Just how much baggage can Congressional leaders attach to urgently needed disaster relief? We’re about to find out. The House voted on a clean bill to fund initial Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts this afternoon, but it won’t remain clean for long:

The House is expected to pass the first installment Wednesday of emergency funding for the recovery effort following Hurricane Harvey, which will be immediately sent to the Senate.

When the upper chamber receives the bill, lawmakers are expected to attach a measure to lift the debt ceiling, vote on the package and send it back to the House for a final vote by the end of the week.

The bill prepared by the House Appropriations Committee matches the full $7.85 billion White House request, which includes $7.4 billion for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund and $450 million to to support the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program.

Senate Republican leadership is privately contemplating a bold maneuver: attaching the government funding bill (CR) to the debt ceiling and emergency funding aid for Hurricane Harvey.

Three sources with knowledge of the discussions confirmed them to Axios. They stressed nothing has been decided and the move would be highly risky, with a strong chance of a conservative revolt. It’s especially unclear whether such a vehicle could move through the House — given the Freedom Caucus and other conservative members are already angry about the plans to use the Harvey funding to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts.

Would the Freedom Caucus be able to hold it up? That seems unlikely, as Paul Ryan could depend on a significant number of Democrats to cross over and support the debt-ceiling hike and the CR. He couldn’t get that with ObamaCare repeal for obvious reasons, but there is no ideological opposition to any of the three main components across the aisle this time. Ryan would take a shellacking for it, but he could probably get it shoved through the House.

Would Donald Trump would sign it, though? Maybe, maybe not. McConnell claims that all three components are Trump priorities too, and he’d be fine with combining them up, but would a lack of funding for the border wall in the CR stall the bill?

“I hope the president tells Congress if that kind of package is on the table they should stuff it,” said David Bozell, president of For America, a conservative advocacy group.

Trump threatened to shut down the government over border wall funding at a campaign-style rally in Phoenix last month, though he has softened his tone since Harvey made landfall.

“I keep going back to May, when the omnibus package was passed and Trump signed it in the middle of the night in Bedminster with no cameras around. That’s not winning to him, and I don’t think he’s going to put himself through that again,” Bozell added.

It’s true that Trump was unhappy about those circumstances, but he didn’t have much choice then. He would probably have less choice now, especially with a bill that had bipartisan support and billions of aid for immediate relief in Texas. He can live to fight the border-wall battle in December without tying up aid, and by December the aid issue in Texas will have slipped more into the background for most Americans. Strategically it’s a better plan, even if it looks like a tactical retreat now for conservatives — which, of course, it would be.

]]>Democrats threaten a brief, pointless government shutdownhttps://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/08/democrats-threaten-a-brief-pointless-government-shutdown/
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 22:21:45 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3935154"They're not going to get what they want."

Senate Democrats are preparing to force a brief, pointless government shutdown this weekend, the first evidence of their newly acquired taste for obstructionism. Senate Democrats are demanding Republican re-negotiate a bill which would extend health insurance for miners. However, members of the House are already on their way out of town meaning the time for negotiating is over. From Politico:

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), two senators up for reelection in 2018 from states won by Donald Trump, are leading the charge to get a better deal from Republican leaders, a drive that’s resonating with the rest of the 46-member Democratic caucus. But Republicans say they will not renegotiate a four-month extension of coal miner health benefits and that Democrats have lost all leverage after the House passed the spending bill, 326-96, and then promptly left town…

“A lot of our members feel extremely strongly about miners,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the incoming Democratic leader next year. Asked how they can negotiate with the House already done for the year, Schumer said: “That’s all I’m saying.”

The reason Schumer isn’t saying more is because what Democrats are doing makes no sense except when viewed as a tantrum. In order to keep the government running without interruption, the Senate needs unanimous consent to vote on the bill by this Friday but that would require cooperation from Senate Democrats. The Washington Post reports:

The Senate will now need to vote on the legislation by the end of Friday to avert a government shutdown. But it would need unanimous consent to take up the bill in time to meet that deadline and Democrats are threatening to withhold their support for such a procedural move. The Senate would still be able to vote Sunday to pass the appropriations measure without this consent, but it would force a roughly one-day government shutdown.

After the House passed the spending bill Thursday a spokesman for Paul Ryan said, “The House just took its last votes of the year.” In other words, nothing else will happen on the House side until members of Congress return to work in January. Again, Democrats know this is over but are looking for a symbolic win of some kind. The GOP seems to be taking a ‘wait them out’ response. Sen. John Cornyn tells Politico, “They’re not going to get what they want. They ought to actually be grateful for what they got.”

Naturally, Democrats are already trying to blame the shutdown they intend to cause on the GOP. Sen. Tim Kaine said, “If Republicans want to shut it down, they will.” Is anyone in the media going to buy it?

Lots of recriminations are already descending on Republicans in Congress for agreeing to a spending extension last night, won by wide margins in both the House and the Senate by the participation of Democrats to avert a government shutdown. The continuing resolution kicks the can down the road until December 11th, when most of the Beltway will be focused on the upcoming holidays:

Just hours before a midnight deadline, a bitterly divided Congress approved a stopgap spending bill Wednesday to keep the federal government open — but with no assurance there won’t be yet another shutdown showdown in December.

Democrats helped beleaguered House Republican leaders pass the measure by 277-151 — a lopsided vote shrouding deep disagreements within the GOP — after the Senate approved it by a 78-20 tally earlier in the day. The votes sent the bill to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Approval of such stopgap measures used to be routine, but debate this year exposed acrimonious divisions between pragmatic Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner and more junior lawmakers in the party’s tea party wing who are less inclined to compromise.

I’m actually surprised that Democrats went for the CR, especially in the Senate. I expected Harry Reid to force Mitch McConnell to round up enough Republicans to pass it, and then blame the GOP when it failed. Perhaps Reid worried that the press would not be cynical enough to back him up on that analysis. Oh ye of little faith …

One can understand why Republicans wanted this can kicked now, particularly in the House, as frustrating as it is. Boehner’s resignation has just kicked off a big leadership fight, which will already generate enough bad press about the GOP. A shutdown in the middle of a leadership fight would make the GOP look even more in disarray than it already is, with fractured responses to the inevitable public-monument closures and sad-panda coverage of federal workers who would have their back pay all but guaranteed anyway. It may not be satisfying, but in this case discretion probably is the better part of valor.

Besides, the spending fights didn’t get jettisoned; they just got postponed for two months. Most of the recent focus has been on federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but the real fight will likely be for the spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Republicans want an end to cuts in defense spending, and Barack Obama and the Democrats want to remove BCA-sequestration controls on entitlement spending. A fight is coming soon enough, and McClatchy’s William Douglas previews it:

Even before lawmakers passed Wednesday’s continuing resolution, all sides were bracing for the new budget fight. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., indicated that Democrats won’t surrender ground on sequestration.

Senate Democrats already are playing hardball by filibustering spending bills in attempts to pressure Republicans to renegotiate lifting the budget caps that began in 2013 as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act.

“Lifting the sequester has been one of my top priorities for years,” Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “I hope we can finally achieve this key Democratic goal.”

Republicans have voiced support for lifting sequester caps as well. But while Democrats have focused their attention on lifting them for more spending, most Republicans are interested in boosting the defense budget.

“We have to,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The outgoing chief of staff of the United States Army said that we can no longer defend the nation adequately. That should be sufficient to most members of Congress.”

Hawkish Republicans who oppose increasing domestic spending could balk at easing sequestration, knowing that they can boost the Pentagon’s budget by circumventing the mandatory spending caps.

In two months, this will be the real battle over the budget. Conservatives now fighting over Planned Parenthood funding should take note of this, especially since the only real way to end Planned Parenthood funding is to have a President who will sign a budget without it. The easy way out of the BCA fight would be to hike spending in both entitlements and defense, and unless they hold Republican leadership’s collective feet to the fire, that may be the end result. That would set a new baseline for spending that will be difficult to walk back, even with Congress and the White House under Republican control in 2017.

Remember how the last, embarrassingly close vote for Speaker meant that John Boehner’s time was through at the top of the House — even if Republicans kept their majority? Good times, good times. The fortunes of Boehner have turned positive enough that the New York Times reports on them as merely an aside on how the GOP won’t conduct a government shutdown in the coming budget fight. One has to read down to the eighth paragraph to learn this:

He is expected to be re-elected easily when the 114th Congress convenes on Jan. 6, unlike two years ago when a divided Republican conference embarrassed him with an uncomfortably close vote. This time his deputies are carefully counting their support, leaving nothing to chance.

His majority — likely to be 247 seats after a few undecided races are settled — will be the largest any Republican speaker has had since 1929, so large that it is approaching the size that Democrats had in the 1960s when they solidified control of the House that endured for decades.

But what he is able to do with that power will determine whether he is remembered as something more than the House leader during a stretch of frustrating gridlock and deep partisanship.

“He’s never wanted to just be speaker,” said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and a close ally. “He’s wanted to be a historically significant speaker.”

In fact, far from the predictions of his decline and fall two years ago, the Times now predicts that Boehner will retain his gavel not just in 2015 but also in 2017, too. “He has no obvious challengers from within his inner circle,” write Carl Hulse and Jeremy Peters. It takes another seven paragraphs to mention why — the defeat of Eric Cantor in a primary eliminated one strategic option for a palace coup. The resulting shake-up also allowed Boehner to work with conservatives to bridge strategic differences and reinforce his authority within the caucus.

Plus, of course, Republicans won the midterm elections. In 2012, the GOP actually gave back a few seats, although not enough to give up the majority, in an election that many thought could have been won with a more conservative candidate at the top of the ticket. This time, the GOP thumped the Democrats much more than predicted, and the result is the biggest majority Republicans have had since Herbert Hoover. If Nancy Pelosi can go unchallenged for her leadership position after that kind of defeat — and two big losses in three cycles — then why would anyone think that the House GOP would dump Boehner after two big wins out of three?

Chris Cillizza issues a mea culpa for his earlier prediction that Boehner would get the boot:

1. Winning changes everything. This is the most obvious thing I overlooked in my Boehner-can’t-hold-on conclusion. The 2014 election was a very good one to be a Republican; while most prognosticators expected a mid- to high-single-digit seat gain for Republicans, the party has netted 10 seats so far and has two more in the bag in Louisiana come Saturday. And the GOP is ahead in Arizona’s 2nd. That’s a 13-seat gain — and the largest Republican House majority since World War II. When your team wins the World Series, you don’t fire the manager — no matter how up and down the season that led to that championship was. …

4. Obama. Boehner’s best ally in shoring up support among House Republicans was the man sitting in the White House. There is nothing so unifying in politics as rallying around a common enemy. As 2014 wore on and relations between the White House and congressional Republicans eroded even further, Boehner was able to cast himself as the one guy willing to stand up for conservative values against the administration. His decision to file suit against Obama over the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act thrilled conservatives. And the coming fight over Obama’s executive action on immigration will have a similar rally ’round the speaker effect. Being Obama’s foil is a recipe for success for a national Republican leader. And that’s the space Boehner has increasingly filled.

But what about the shutdown? Lots of commentators are predicting trouble for Republicans if they don’t pass a spending bill in the House this week that the outgoing Democratic majority in the Senate will accept. Politico’s Jake Sherman foresees a more subtle strategy developing:

But inside Republican leadership, senior aides and lawmakers freely admit that the executive order — no matter how unpopular it is — will likely stand and there’s little Congress can do about it. So Boehner, McCarthy and Scalise need to craft a process that will allow conservatives to vent, but prevent a shutdown.

The strategy will begin to take shape Tuesday morning, when the GOP meets in a closed session in the Capitol basement.

One scheme has emerged as a favorite. The leadership would like to craft two bills to fund the government: one that would keep most of the government open through September 2015, and another that would fund immigration enforcement agencies through the first few months of the year. There’s also the potential for stand-alone legislation to try to target Obama’s executive action.

The bigger question will be whether Democrats can sustain a bipartisan agreement even if the House passes it:

The White House threatened to veto the $450 billion agreement between Reid and Boehner because it did not cover expansions of the child tax credit and earned income tax credit favored by Obama. The package would also add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.

Reid backed the bipartisan package because it would extend the deduction for state sales taxes, which is important in his home state of Nevada, which has no income tax.

The veto threat has left the fate of the tax extenders package up in the air, and it’s not clear that it will get done during the lame-duck session.

The real focus should be on the Senate rather than the House. Will Reid go out carrying the White House’s water, or will he abide by any bipartisan agreement and put Obama on the spot?

With all of the other news ricocheting around the media and social networks, this may seem like a sleeper of a story, but it’s a bigger deal than one might think — literally as well as figuratively. Last night, House Republicans unveiled their proposed continuing resolution that will fund government well past the midterm elections, and it won’t make conservatives like Rep. Jeb Hensarling too happy. The proposal calls for a simple extension of current funding, plus some extra cash to deal with the Ebola outbreak in Africa and more flexibility on the use of cash for border security. Otherwise, this is a pooch kick to December:

House Republican leaders Tuesday unveiled a temporary government funding bill that includes a short-term extension of a trade-promotion agency that has been targeted by conservative activists, eliminating a key sticking point in the effort to avoid a government shutdown.

The bill would keep the government running on this year’s budget levels from the start of the new fiscal year, Oct. 1, until ­mid-December, when negotiators would prefer to approve detailed spending plans for the federal agencies through 2015.

Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the bill would keep federal agencies open through Dec. 11, would match President Obama’s request for $88 million in funds to help fight the spread of Ebola in Africa, and would provide flexibility to departments working on the U.S.-Mexico border to handle the flood of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving at the border.

Even Hensarling bowed to the wisdom of putting off the Export-Import Bank fight until the next session of Congress, according to John Boehner:

Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters that he had been discussing the issue with Hensarling, who had agreed that extending the agency into next year would be a smarter move than engaging in a shutdown fight just ahead of the November elections over a relatively obscure agency that promotes jobs.

“He thinks that a temporary extension of the Export-Import Bank is in order,” Boehner told reporters, a rare instance of the speaker announcing the intentions of one of his committee chairmen.

Hensarling repeatedly denied requests for comment Tuesday. Senior GOP aides in the House and Senate suggested that building in time for the fight next spring and summer would be a smarter play, especially if the Senate flips to Republican control in the midterm elections.

That’s certainly true, assuming that the GOP can win control of the Senate. Passing a continuing resolution now and avoiding a game of chicken with the Senate at the end of September improves their chances, certainly, by allowing the budget differences to float under the radar until after the midterms. Few Republicans want another government shutdown while they’re winning so handily otherwise in midterm momentum, and any game-changers are not likely to be positive.

Of course, even a clean CR doesn’t mean that Harry Reid can’t throw a wrench into the works. However, Reid drew the line yesterday before the GOP unveiled the proposal, and probably can’t go back and redraw it after getting what he publicly demanded:

The Post’s Robert Costa and Paul Kane foresee this gaining easy Senate approval, which would then mean almost certain approval from Barack Obama. The last thing he needs in this election is to be so out of the mainstream as to fall outside a bipartisan budget agreement, even if it’s temporary.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a driving force behind last year’s partial government shutdown, said Tuesday that he would like to attach a measure to the spending bill stopping Obama from taking executive action to curb deportations.

“I think we should use any and all means necessary to prevent the president from illegally granting amnesty,” Cruz said at a news conference.

“That certainly, I think, would be appropriate to include” in the spending bill, Cruz said. “But I think we should use every — every — tool at our disposal.”

Cruz made his statement in response to a question from a reporter, and it was plain that he doesn’t want to spark a repeat of last year’s shutdown. He’s unlikely to get his vote.

And one House conservative who joined Cruz at the news conference said it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to use the spending bill to force a showdown over immigration.

“We need to pass whatever funding to prevent a government shutdown, first and foremost,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to risk a government shutdown.”

Some conservatives may not be happy with a delay on fighting for spending reductions and the end of the Ex-Im Bank, but this is a tactical delay rather than a retreat. It does set up an interesting Christmas-season debate, however, if the lame-duck session of Congress wants to have one.

Worth posting not because Cruz actually intends to try to shut down the government before the midterms but because Democratic leaders and lefty media will gorge on the mere possibility. Now that amnesty’s dead until November, they need something to goose their base. Another shutdown scare will do nicely.

The tea party hero, who aggressively pushed the anti-Obamacare strategy that spurred last year’s 16-day government shutdown, has seized on immigration executive moves from the Obama administration as the root cause of the border crisis this summer.

Although Obama said this weekend that he would delay any executive actions on immigration until the end of the year, Cruz indicated Tuesday that he still wanted to target the issue this month.

“I think we should use any and all means necessary to prevent the president from illegally granting amnesty,” Cruz said when asked Tuesday whether he wants to include such provisions in a continuing resolution to fund the federal government. “That certainly, I think, would be appropriate to include in the CR, but I think we should use every – every – tool at our disposal.”

In theory, the House would pass a Republican bill demanding the end of DACA as a condition to new funding for the government, Reid’s Democratic Senate majority would shoot it down, and then we’d be stuck a la last October as the clock ticked towards the expiration of the current funding bill. In reality, that’ll never happen. For one thing, even while talking tough today, Cruz wouldn’t say that he’d try to block a House bill that lacked the DACA language. (“I have a habit of waiting to actually see what’s in legislation before I make a decision whether I will support or oppose it.”) A man who’s thinking seriously of running for president isn’t going to mess with another shutdown.

For another thing, if worse came to worst, Boehner would surely defy House tea partiers and agree to pass a clean funding bill without the DACA language to avoid a pre-midterm shutdown. The tea partiers in his caucus might be grumpy about that but they wouldn’t hold much of a grudge knowing what a shutdown could do to their own prospects on election day. The only snag for Boehner is whether House Democrats would help him by voting for a clean bill or whether they’d hold out until a majority of Republicans agreed to vote for it too. That could ensure a shutdown by leaving Boehner far short of 218 votes, but it’d be tricky politically. How would Dems justify opposing Boehner on a bill that gives Obama and Reid exactly what they ask for?

As inconvenient as Cruz’s DACA talk might be for the GOP leadership, one nice thing about it is that it keeps amnesty front and center before the big vote. Obama took a lot of knocks for that over the weekend from Democrats after he announced that he was postponing his executive order. If he’s worried that Republicans will make electoral hay of that order, Dems wondered, how does promising to issue the order once the elections are over ease that worry? Every Republican in the country is now going to be running on the idea that the only way to stop Obama is to elect a GOP Senate, in which case O might as well have issued his order now and accepted the consequences. Making DACA an issue in the coming battle over funding the government forces the media to keep reminding voters that amnesty is on the way later this year. That’s useful for the GOP so long as the standoff doesn’t end in a shutdown. Which, like I say, it won’t.

In an impressive display of Beltway mentality, the Washington Post invited federal workers to sing the blues about their possible furloughs, should the government shut down. These federal workers already have better pay and benefits than most of the taxpayers funding their jobs, and in the event of a government shutdown, those taxpayers come to find that much of what they’ve been funding is “nonessential,” according to the very government that employs these multitudes. But it hurts to be told you’re “nonessential,” and the Washington Post allows a place to vent. Some of those who contributed are officially “essential” and should be— they perform “essential activities to the extent that they protect life and property,” according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Others should probably stay quiet, lest loudly proclaiming their job descriptions makes taxpayers think, “Wait, what are we paying you for?” Like this guy:

And, lo, it came to pass that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission environmental engineers were furloughed, and from that day forth, we were forced to dine on raw ox tails and dried lentils before we ventured out to light the tiki torches that ward off bands of marauding coyotes and looters but stand as a bleak reminder of better times, when we knew how to use fire to cook meat. But that was before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission environmental engineers were furloughed for 3-7 days, my child.

Most of the political danger of a government shut down, unfortunately, likely falls on Republicans. It’s not fair that part of the reason for that is a media happy to blame them and them alone, as Mark Halperin pointed out, but it’s the truth and one we must recognize as we’re gearing up to fight a message battle on that front. But there is danger for Democrats and liberals, too, just as there was with sequestration. A shutdown necessarily highlights many jobs taxpayers had no idea they were funding. Most of the pain from a shutdown falls within the Beltway, where as I mentioned, salaries are higher and the economy more prosperous than the rest of the country thanks to taxpayer money siphoned from them to serve the ruling and contractor class. And, in the end, it may be that people’s personal experiences don’t live up to the sky-is-falling expectations set by the media and Democrats. That’s what happened with sequestration, and it’s why the Continuing Resolution’s spending levels being set at sequestration level is a virtually controversy-free part of this fight. The fact that America doesn’t fall apart when small parts of the federal government are dismantled is a good thing, for the country in general, and for making conservative arguments. It’s less likely that a shutdown redounds to conservative benefit on this front than sequestration did but it’s worth pondering if we end up in this message battle.

What worries me is that fighting the shutdown messaging battle prevents conservatives and the rest of the country from focusing on another government function that doesn’t live up to the hype tomorrow. When those signing up for Obamacare run into the “glitch” that is the very nature of the program, it will constitute the public’s most concrete collision with the broken promises of the program. As with sequestration, real people will learn quickly that what Obama and Democrats said would come to pass simply didn’t, this time with far graver consequences to them and their families than in the case of sequestration.

Now, credit where credit is due. Thank you to the federal government workers with a sense of self-awareness. Like this guy:

Mike Marsh is a federal employee who wrote to Congress this summer with an unusual proposal to save the government money.

Fire me, Marsh told lawmakers. And everyone I work with.

“I have concluded that [my agency] is a congressional experiment that hasn’t worked out in practice,” wrote Marsh, who is the inspector general for the Denali Commission, an economic-development agency based in Alaska. “I recommend that Congress put its money elsewhere.”

This has been tried before. But not often. Old Washington hands could remember only two other federal workers who had lobbied publicly to have themselves defunded. One was a high-level Ronald Reagan appointee. One was a lowly weather observer.

Both failed. Meaning they weren’t fired.

Marsh seems likely to fail, too — even though his requests arrived in Washington in the middle of a battle to cut the budget. His agency seems protected by one of Washington’s most enduring customs: the defense of home-state giveaways, even in times of national austerity.

Marsh draws an important distinction in his fight: he doesn’t necessarily think his commission’s mission isn’t worthwhile, but that it doesn’t have to be performed at taxpayer expense. Liberals get away with obliterating that distinction at every turn. Government does not equal society. One can hope that truth wins out in the event of a shutdown, as it did in sequestration.

The series starts with Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is diagnosed with lung cancer. His lousy health maintenance organization won’t cover a decent doctor, or treatment. So Walter is forced to turn to crime just to pay his medical bills and … whoa, wait a minute. You know who has excellent benefits, compared with basically everyone else in the country? Teachers, firefighters and cops…

Later, after Walt’s actions accidentally result in the shooting of his brother-in-law, a Drug Enforcement Agency agent, Walt’s wife takes a bunch of the meth money to pay for Hank’s treatment. On his government salary, Hank can’t possibly afford the treatment he needs, because, of course, his lousy insurance policy won’t cover more than a few visits to the physical therapist … and whoa, we just went from “unrealistic” to “ludicrous.” You know who has even better benefits than employees enjoying a compensation package collectively bargained with a local government? Federal employees in a low-cost state such as New Mexico. Moreover, extra benefits are available to people injured in the line of duty.

Via the Corner, something to keep you occupied while we wait for shutdown fee-vah to resume at 2 p.m. ET. That’s when Reid will — finally — call the Senate into session to reject the House’s new CR demanding a one-year delay to ObamaCare. Then it’ll be back to the House for Boehner’s Plan C, assuming there is one. There was chatter yesterday about maybe bringing up Vitter’s amendment to deny O-Care subsidies to members of Congress and staff, but House conservatives seem to think that’s weak tea. A one-year delay of the law seems to be as far as they’re willing to go, and Reid’s going to kill that off within the next few hours. Which means Boehner either (1) has to cut the conservatives loose and pass something with Democratic help, which might put his Speakership in trouble; (2) pass a clean “stopgap” funding resolution for a week or two to keep negotiations with the Democrats going, something conservatives also might not accept; or (3) bring on the shutdown and hope for the best, even if “the best” means the GOP taking a beating in public opinion until House conservatives relent.

There’s always a chance that Obama will cave and decide to agree to some sort of face-saving compromise. But maybe Obama’s not driving this train anymore:

When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting, according to several people familiar with the situation. Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn’t attend such a session. Obama scrapped it.

As Washington barrels forward to the first government shutdown in 17 years on Tuesday, the wily Reid has taken the lead role in pushing a hardball Democratic legislative strategy that can be summed up like this: Make the Republicans cave…

Reid’s strategy boils down to a few factors: If Democrats give even a few small concessions on a short-term stopgap funding measure, Republicans will demand even bigger concessions to avoid a debt default in mid-October. Since Republicans have been engulfed in an intraparty war over how far to take a shutdown threat, Reid and his top lieutenants are convinced that the political backlash from a shutdown would be devastating to the GOP, potentially costing them their majority in the House.

Actually, that raises possibility (4): Maybe Boehner can convince House conservatives to punt all of this to next month’s debt-ceiling showdown, when the GOP will have more leverage. Paul Ryan hinted at something like that this weekend, although Ted Cruz reportedly advised House conservatives to insist on concessions now, as part of funding the government. That may be a rare point of agreement between RINOs and “true conservatives”: Some RINOs might prefer brinksmanship now, even if it means a shutdown for awhile, to brinksmanship later with the threat of default hanging in the balance. The stakes will be way higher then and, the theory goes, if tea partiers get this “out of their system” now, they’ll be less likely to go to the mat again next month. I’m … not sure how that logic works, though. Unless Reid and Obama cave now and give up something important on ObamaCare, House conservatives will conclude that a government shutdown simply isn’t enough leverage and that they need to be twice as obstinate when it comes to the debt ceiling. The only thing that might convince them otherwise would be a sharp public backlash to a shutdown, but what constitutes “sharp”? And how long would the shutdown need to last to achieve sharpness? I think Boehner will bend and pass something with Democrats if this stretches more than 10 days or so. And then, with the debt ceiling on his plate, he may finally conclude that this job isn’t worth the trouble anymore and do it again.

By the way, the first casualty of the shutdown looks like to be Pandacam. Steel yourselves, my friends.

McCarthy, the third-ranking House Republican, said his chamber will send the continuing resolution back to the Senate with “another provision” attached, and said there are “few other options” for those provisions…

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement Saturday that he will not accept either of those changes. Senate Democratic leadership has long said they will reject any tweaks to Obamacare as part of the continuing resolution.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” McCarthy did not elaborate on the options, although he said “there are a lot of items on the table.” But one possibility floated on Capitol Hill Saturday is an amendment that would ban federal health care subsidies for lawmakers and their aides.

I talked with one of the most vocal of the defund/delay advocates, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, on Friday night, as she waited to hear what path the House Republican leadership would take. It’s safe to say her views reflected those of many of her conservative colleagues, and her reasoning was this: One, Obamacare as a policy is so far-reaching, so consequential, and so damaging that members of Congress should do everything they can — everything — to stop it before it fully goes into effect. Two, lesser measures to fight Obamacare — repealing the medical device tax or making Congress purchase coverage through the exchanges without special subsidies — are just not big enough to address the problem. And three, there have been government shutdowns in the past over far less urgent reasons that did not result in doom for Republicans…

“This isn’t just another bill,” Bachmann continued. “This isn’t load limits on turnip trucks that we’re talking about. This is consequential. And I think the reason why you’ve come to this flash point is that this is an extremely consequential bill that will impact every American, and that’s why you have such passionate opinions. And we’re not giving up and we’re not caving in that easily.”

***

While Boehner and the GOP leadership want mainly to navigate safe passage through the budget deadlines, DeMint and his cohort see the deadlines as crucial tests of party resolve and a key to the Republican resurgence they envision. DeMint views the impulse to avoid confrontation as the root of Republican woes: Only by engineering grand clashes and then standing resolutely on the side of small government can Republicans win this existential struggle.

“If I were speaker, I’d tell the president, ‘Mr. President, we funded the government, but we’re not going to fund your bill,’ ” says DeMint, who likes to make his point by acting out imagined confrontations. “ ‘We are not going to give in—one month, two months, three months. We are never going to give in. It’s just that important.’ And if the president wants to put the country through that to save a law that isn’t ready to go, well, then that’s a battle we have to have.”…

DeMint likes to quote the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek: “Politicians are corks bobbing on the water, but we can direct the current.” Right now, Boehner is caught in a current from which he can’t seem to escape. Appeals to moderation won’t work; the purists see moderation as the problem. To DeMint, the only question is how committed Republicans are to an ideology they all profess to agree on. “There isn’t a Republican in Congress who hasn’t promised to do everything they could to stop Obamacare,” he says. “There’s no intellectual rift. The rift is over is it worth fighting for?”

***

Rogers: Would the gentleman yield?

McGovern: I happily yield.

Rogers: You say the president has threatened to veto the bill?

McGovern: No, he hasn’t threatened. He said he absolutely will veto.

Rogers: He’s drawn a red line has he?

McGovern: Yep.

At this point, the small hearing room—which was largely filled with committee members, other members of Congress who had come to testify and congressional staff— burst into laughter.

“Let’s be really honest about this,” Labrador added. “The other side would like to see Republicans in trouble in 2014. The other side wants to make sure that they’re not even willing to meet us halfway.”

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman added that “Republicans know this is a loser for them,” so he had some advice.

“Republicans are going to have to learn the lessons from this whole episode,” the former GOP presidential candidate said. “And that will be, you can’t have an all-or-nothing approach.”

***

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) raised another potential snag for House Republicans, one some members may not have realized yet. If there is a government shutdown, Congress will have to adopt a funding bill to restart all shuttered government operations. That gives Obama and the Democrats additional leverage.

“I think the answer is ‘No,’ we’re not ready because I’m convinced that once the government shuts down, you have to have Barack Obama’s permission as it were, you need [Democrats’] help to start it back up again,” Franks admitted. “And if they think that the country is blaming Republicans, they will not hesitate to keep it shut down as long as possible.”

A shutdown, however, could help cool the partisan temperature within House GOP ranks. Hard-line conservatives, buoyed by their tea party supporters back home, have pined for a climactic face-off with Obama and the Democrats. Some say that they need a crisis to force Obama to negotiate — Democrats laugh at this contention. Now they could be getting exactly what they asked for, and party leaders and senior aides are convinced they won’t like it when they do.

“More tears have been shed over prayers that were answered than those denied,” joked a senior House Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They’ve wanted it. Now we’ll see how they deal with it.”

***

Happy Ending #3: Even if the president does not blink, and even if Democrats don’t get blamed, perhaps Republican activists will be so motivated and mobilized by the shutdown that their excitement will loft the party to big wins in the 2014 races.

Problem with Happy Ending #3: Because Happy Endings 1 and 2 look so unlikely, the shutdown is likely to end in a Republican retreat. Party activists will be demotivated—and may waste their energy recriminating against their own leadership rather than organizing to fight Democrats.

All in all, it’s hard to see any positive outcome emerging for Republicans from this confrontation. Yet the party is charging forward anyway. Why?

The short answer is a breakdown in the party’s ability to govern itself. It can’t think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss.

***

Boehner’s members refused to wait for the debt ceiling. They want their showdown now. And that’s all for the better.

Moving the one-year delay of Obamacare to the CR maximizes the chances of a shutdown but makes a default at least somewhat less likely. If a shutdown begins Monday night, Republicans and Democrats will have more than two weeks to resolve it before hitting the debt ceiling.

As Alec Phillips put it in a research note for Goldman Sachs, “If a shutdown is avoided, it is likely to be because congressional Republicans have opted to wait and push for policy concessions on the debt limit instead. By contrast, if a shutdown occurs, we would be surprised if congressional Republicans would want to risk another difficult situation only a couple of weeks later. The upshot is that while a shutdown would be unnecessarily disruptive, it might actually ease passage of a debt limit increase.”

***

KARL: Well, unclear, but what I am hearing this morning from Republicans is that they will still attempt to put provisions in there dealing with the healthcare law and send it back to the Senate. This ping pong back and forth will go on. No signs of compromise on either side.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And then the question is how long will that go, a couple of days, or does it stretch on maybe up to the point where we reach that second major deadline, the debt limit reach on October 17? Far more serious, but does this back and forth make it more likely that we’ll avoid a confrontation over the debt limit?

KARL: Well, there are two schools of thought on this. One is that this works out so poorly for the Republicans that they realize they can’t go to the brink again with the debt ceiling. On the other side of this, George, positions have gotten so hardened here and there’s such division that it’s hard to imagine a compromise on the debt ceiling either. That said, I should tell you that aides to the Speaker of the House tell me that they are confident that the debt ceiling will be dealt with, that there will not be a default. I just can’t see exactly how we get there by October 17.

***

It is the Democrats who have taken the absolutist position. Look, I’d like to repeal every word of the law. But that wasn’t my position in this fight. My position in this fight was we should defund it, which is different from repeal. And even now what the House of Representatives has done is a step removed from defunding. It’s delaying. Now that’s the essence of a compromise. For all of us who want to see it repealed, simply delaying it for American families on the same terms as being done for big corporations—that’s a compromise.

At the same time, David, what have the Democrats compromised on? Nothing. Zero. Their position is absolutely no. How is that compromise?

“I’ve never seen a time — can you remember a time in your lifetime when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for America to fail … I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’ll be shocked if it fails,” Clinton, who attempted during his first term as president to overhaul the country’s healthcare system in the early 1990s, said during an interview taped Thursday in New York while the annual Clinton Global Initiative was taking place.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Friday that the Senate is done acting on legislation to avert a government shutdown and that House Republicans have no choice but to pass the Senate’s bill if they want to keep the government open.

“I want everyone to listen and to hear: The United States Senate has acted,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “This is the only legislation that can avert a government shutdown, and that time is ticking as we speak.”…

It’s a small group of conservatives that have tied the hands of Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — just enough Republicans to prevent the leadership from being able to exert its will…

Boehner tried to avert a government shutdown by seeking to direct angst over Obamacare to the debt ceiling fight, where he thought Obama would want to cut a deal that would include replacing the sequester. He first proposed using the debt ceiling vote as a backstop — something Republicans could look forward to if they didn’t get their way in the CR fight. But the rank-and-file rejected that strategy. Then, leadership sought to have a debt ceiling vote before the one on government funding. Rank-and-file Republicans rejected that as well, saying they wanted to see what the ultimate resolution in the CR battle before committing to raising the debt ceiling.

***

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said he thought “red state Democrats” would ultimately take the bait on Obamacare-related provisions, naming vulnerable Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Mark Begich of Alaska and Kay Hagan of North Carolina.

A senior Democratic member told CQ Roll Call that Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was sending GOP emissaries to key Democratic offices to take the temperature of what they would and wouldn’t accept in a CR deal. Boehner’s office denied that such an effort was in play.

***

Representative Tom Graves of Georgia announced on Friday that he and 61 of his colleagues would insist on a one-year delay of “Obamacare,” which is set to launch on October 1, as a condition of funding the government and averting a shutdown…

“If the government shuts down, it’s not what you think it would be. I have actually experienced that,” [Lindsey] Graham said. “If anybody creates a process where our military doesn’t get paid, and their families, they’re going to make an enemy … of me for life.”…

“I will do everything in my power to make sure that our men and women in uniform, and our law enforcement officers and intelligence community who’s fighting a war while we argue among ourselves get paid,” Graham said.

***

[GOP Rep. Richard] Hudson told reporters he was more worried about the impact of Obamacare going into effect for his constituents than any fallout from a possible government shutdown.

“I don’t see a long-term economic impact. I think the impact of all the jobs we’re going to lose because of Obamacare is much worse,” Hudson said.

Cole disagreed and said a shutdown would affect millions of Americans and result in job loss. He took a jab at fellow Republicans who downplayed the fallout for their party, saying “Politically, anybody who thinks it’s not high-risk is not playing with a full deck. It’s an extraordinary high risk for not much gain.”

***

“We were able to extract a great deal from the shutdown and could’ve gotten even more had we pressed further,” Gingrich said. “The challenge was that [Senate Leader] Dole was going to run for president. He had been a good partner to us in the Senate, and the situation put him in a real bind.”

“What the American people are seeing in Washington today are three factions: the Democrats, who have no interest in negotiating; The accomodationist Republicans, who just want everything to stay the same and for people to get along and go along; And the conservative reformers who recognize the need for real, dramatic change,” Gingrich said. “The first two factions are only interested in avoiding blame. The third is willing to take a hit from the elite media if what comes out at the end is real cuts to government spending, real reforms, real help for the economy and job growth.”…

“We are approaching, two years from now, the 900th anniversary of the Magna Carta. The idea that elected representatives of the people can use the power of the purse to negotiate. Barack Obama is not a monarch. Boehner should tell the president he has til Thanksgiving to golf, and then he needs to come negotiate,” said Gingrich.

***

Here’s the problem, though. Every time he cuts one of those deals, he ups the odds angry conservatives will try to replace him. Mindful of their tenuous position, GOP leaders have been trying to head off the shutdown by promising members an even tougher confrontation on the much scarier debt limit. If Boehner gets through the shutdown and debt limit fight without drawing blood, that could be the last straw for House conservatives.

“If a shutdown is avoided, it is likely to be because congressional Republicans have opted to wait and push for policy concessions on the debt limit instead,” Goldman Sachs economist Alec Phillips wrote in a research note. “By contrast, if a shutdown occurs, we would be surprised if congressional Republicans would want to risk another difficult situation only a couple of weeks later.”

***

Like an insistent teenage driver, determined to see how fast he can take that blind curve on a rainy road at night, the GOP seems unwilling to abandon its particular brand of brinkmanship until it winds up in the emergency room. If that’s the case, mightn’t it be better to let the crash happen, if only so the reconstruction can start?

In a Washington in which serial crisis over basic business has become the new norm — and the Republicans’ default negotiating posture has all the bluster of the Cowardly Lion’s “Put ’em uuup! Put ’em uuup!” — perhaps the thing to do is accept the worst. If the latest go-round is simply another ritualized prelude to a temporary solution, another melodramatic installment of “As the World Turns,” then what’s the point? Won’t the same cast be back next month, or next year, battling the same problem?…

But Erskine Bowles, Simpson’s co-chair on the bipartisan fiscal commission, who lived through the last shutdowns as a senior White House aide to Bill Clinton, said the Republicans now “have themselves in a box.”

“And it’s a box we’ve got to do everything we can to help them get out of. As bad a shutdown would be, it’s not disastrous. It’s bad, it’s silly, it’s stupid, it does hurt people. But it’s not disastrous. Default would be catastrophic and not just for the United States but for the world at large. We’re the world’s reserve currency.”

1. A shutdown would be far less costly than default. Unless Congress acts, most government agencies will shut down on Tuesday. This would inconvenience millions and waste plenty of money, but it wouldn’t affect “mandatory” programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or nutrition assistance. Americans would be angry. The stock market might drop. But we’ve lived through this before. By contrast, a default would be catastrophic. Markets would plummet. Interest rates would rise, probably permanently, because lenders would price in the now-very-real risk of default, making everything from mortgages to cars to college educations more expensive. The government itself would also face higher borrowing costs — a Treasury Department study found that a single percentage-point increase in interest rates would cost taxpayers an additional $150 billion a year. Worst of all, a default would almost certainly snuff out the recovery and bring on another recession.

2. We’d quickly find out which party Americans support. One powerful driver of Washington dysfunction is the certainty among partisans of both camps that Americans secretly agree with them and would rally to their side during a shutdown. In April 2011, when Republicans first demanded concessions to pass a continuing resolution, many hoped for a shutdown because they thought the Tea Party movement that had rebuked Democrats in the midterm elections would rise up once again. Today, many Democrats want a shutdown because polls show Republicans would be blamed. Some Republicans disagree. “I think Americans would side with the people who are fighting against a law they know is unfair,” says Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, the godfather of the “defund Obamacare” movement. A shutdown would make clear who is right and who is wrong, removing the temptation for another showdown.

3. Congress might start working again.

***

If Congress doesn’t pass a budget by Monday – the end of the fiscal year – the government shuts down, along with many vital services the American people depend on. On Friday, the Senate passed a bill to keep the government open. But Republicans in the House have been more concerned with appeasing an extreme faction of their party than working to pass a budget that creates new jobs or strengthens the middle class. And in the next couple days, these Republicans will have to decide whether to join the Senate and keep the government open, or create a crisis that will hurt people for the sole purpose of advancing their ideological agenda.

Past government shutdowns have disrupted the economy. This shutdown would, too. At a moment when our economy has steadily gained traction, and our deficits have been falling faster than at any time in 60 years, a shutdown would be a purely self-inflicted wound…

The American people have worked too hard to recover from crisis to see extremists in their Congress cause another one. And every day this goes on is another day that we can’t continue the work of rebuilding the great American middle class.

]]>https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/28/quotes-of-the-day-1510/feed/506Bob Corker versus Ted Cruz: Do you want to pass good policy or do you want to put on a show?https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/26/bob-corker-versus-ted-cruz-do-you-want-to-pass-good-policy-or-do-you-want-to-put-on-a-show/
https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/26/bob-corker-versus-ted-cruz-do-you-want-to-pass-good-policy-or-do-you-want-to-put-on-a-show/#commentsFri, 27 Sep 2013 01:21:04 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=280533"I think the senator from Texas may be confused."

Painful to watch, just because seeing them go round in circles like this is emblematic of where the wider intraparty debate is right now. Quickie background on what this is about: The anti-filibuster Republicans like Corker, Coburn, and McCain want to get the CR back to the House ASAP so that Boehner can set his own Plan B in motion. That’ll give House Republicans maximum time before the shutdown begins on Tuesday to make some kind of deal with Senate Democrats. Reid was willing to speed up the process so that the final vote on his clean CR, which would fund ObamaCare, was held tonight. But Cruz and Lee objected. Why hold a big vote late at night, under the public’s radar? Hold it tomorrow in the early afternoon when they’re paying attention for maximum accountability. Cruz’s spokesman issued this statement about it:

“The public understands that the key vote is final cloture on the bill, which will take place on Friday morning. Sen. Reid asked to waive the Senate rules to allow the vote to be moved to Thursday night, but it is better that the debate play out in the full light of day so the American people know exactly what is happening. America will be watching closely which senators vote to allow Democrats to fully fund Obamacare, and the vote should be carried out in the open for all to see.”

In other words, says Corker, you guys would rather push back a vote you know you’re going to lose by 15 hours just to give yourselves a bigger grandstanding spotlight than get your defeat over with so that House Republicans have more time to craft an effective counterproposal. Theatrics over policy. That’s the core of his argument, although he touches on it only briefly; I think that, having just impugned Cruz’s and Lee’s motives in an unusually visible way, Corker realized he’d crossed a line and needed to retreat.

Most of the colloquy is thus spent with him playing dumb as to why Cruz would want to filibuster a bill from the House that defunds ObamaCare and then Cruz explaining for the benefit of the audience that a filibuster is the only way to stop Reid from stripping out the “defunding” language from that bill. Corker could have responded to that in various ways. E.g., why are we threatening to shut down the government to defund ObamaCare when a shutdown wouldn’t stop ObamaCare from being funded? Why is a man who spent 21 hours working his persuasive powers against ObamaCare afraid of letting red-state Democrats vote up-or-down on Reid’s clean CR? The GOP could win that outright with 51 votes, assuming Cruz and Lee can get just five Dems to join them. At the very least, it’s worth forcing those red-state Democratic incumbents to take a very risky vote in favor of funding the law, no? Also, won’t this set a precedent that a Democratic minority can and will use to stop Republican legislation — perhaps even an outright repeal of ObamaCare itself if/when Republicans have the votes to make that happen? None of that from Corker, though. He’d rather puzzle over why Cruz wants to filibuster his own party’s bill, even though everyone who’s been paying attention to this figured that out a week ago.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure if he was referring to the medical device tax as “the stupid tax” in the sense that he is simply fed up with its detractors for making so much hay over it, but it certainly does sound like he’s just calling the medical device tax itself just straight-up stupid, no?

Listen, I know you have been listening, but we want a clean CR — that’s what we’re going to get. If they want to shut down the government, here’s how much time they have to figure out it: 4 days, 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 15 seconds. No, they can play around all they want. Some of the biggest supporters for doing away with the stupid tax — I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that — doing away with that tax have told me they won’t support that on CR.

As the Left somehow seems perfectly capable of acknowledging when they propose sin taxes on things they don’t like such as cigarettes, junk food, and guns, taxes are a reliable way for encouraging less of something — but why for goodness’ sake ObamaCare’s authors and supporters want to deter medical-device innovation when the ostensible point of this entire charade is to help bring down health care costs, even they can’t seem to adequately answer.

With its job-killing consequences readily apparent, repeal of the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices has gotten plenty of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill with majorities in both the House and Senate on board to get rid of it. I doubt Reid would want to bring to a vote anything undermining the health care law at this, its critical stage, no matter how much Democrats themselves oppose it; but anyway, as Reid suggested, the Senate’s repeal advocates will likely wait for the debt-ceiling showdown to try and force it, via Politico:

The leading Senate backers of a push to repeal the medical device tax are warning that the government funding bill currently under consideration isn’t the right venue for this fight.

“Right now, it’s not part of the strategy,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the leading Democratic sponsor of legislation that would repeal the 2.3 percent levy on device manufacturers.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Finance Committee who wrote medical device tax repeal legislation with Klobuchar, agreed.

He said it would be better to include the repeal in legislation to raise the debt ceiling.

“We’re going to go after that, but it’s probably going to be on the debt limit,” he said. “There’s a difference: [The CR] is not particularly a tax bill. And there’s a question about putting it there. The next bill is a tax bill.”

Multiple GOP senators tell me House Republicans will likely pass a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government into early October. “It’d be a short-term, clean CR,” as one describes the legislation. “It’d fund the government for one week or so and keep us talking,” says another senator. “I think that’s where they’re moving right now.”

Remember, under the current Senate schedule, Boehner won’t have anything from the Senate to work with until Sunday night at the earliest. Cruz is reportedly under intense pressure from Senate Republicans not to object if McConnell tries to yield back some debate time going forward in the name of letting the House act sooner. But even if that happens, there’s still not enough time left for Reid and Boehner to strike a deal on O-Care. So they’re going to punt for a week while they keep talking. Which makes me wonder: If House conservatives agree to some lesser deal on O-Care — say, Vitter’s plan to force Congress and staff to buy insurance on the exchanges without federal subsidies — would Cruz and Lee accept that or will they continue to (futilely) oppose anything short of defunding? I’m assuming they will, if only in the interest of mending fences at that point, but who knows? If Cruz is the new “president of conservative America,” as I saw written somewhere today, then maybe he needs to vote no on a deal all the way down.

Roll Call is reporting that Boehner et al. are also weighing a one-year delay to ObamaCare’s individual mandate as a fallback option once the “defund” bill is dead. Politico reported that this morning too. Senate Democrats won’t go for that, though, or at least not without a lot of pressure, which makes me think maybe Boehner will pursue a longer stopgap CR of two or three weeks to buy time to apply pressure before the next shutdown deadline rolls around. If you want to sell the public on the eminently reasonable idea that it’s unfair for business to get a break from ObamaCare’s crapola regulations for a year but not individual taxpayers, it’d be nice to have more than a few days to do it.

Exit question: Jim Geraghty wonders if Cruz’s goal all along wasn’t defunding O-Care, which was impossible given the make-up of the Senate, but rather “cementing the public’s perception that Obamacare is entirely a Democrat-run production, and that fixing the problems it creates will require the election of the Republican opposition.” Is the public going to come away with that impression, though, after multiple Republicans vote against Cruz on Reid’s clean CR this weekend? Former party nominee John McCain is delivering rebuttals to Cruz on the Senate floor, for cripes sake. If “Republicans are the answer” is the message Cruz wants to push, having a big internal Republican war between RINOs and true conservatives is a bad way to do it. I think his message is that tea partiers, specifically, are the answer — but if enough tea partiers end up demoralized by the failure of the defunding effort that they stay home next year to protest sending the RINOs back to the House, you could end up with Democrats doing better than they otherwise might have. Ironic.

Update: Remember that NBC story about Rand Paul privately arguing against the Cruz “defund” strategy? Here’s an interesting clip via MFP of Paul not squarely denying that when asked about it by Glenn Beck. The takeaway here isn’t that there’s some sort of rift between Cruz and Paul; there’s no reason to believe that given Paul’s support for Cruz last night. The takeaway is that even Paul seems skittish about the political fallout for the GOP from a shutdown.

Critics question his motives, though — is this about his principles or about presidential aspirations?…

“If you get outside of Washington, D.C., there is a frustration with Washington that is palpable. When you ask your constituents what are the problems you’re facing, over and over again, the answer that comes back is Obamacare is killing jobs, is taking away my health insurance, is driving up my premiums, is causing small businesses to shrink, to go out of business. If we listen to the American people, that should be our priorities,” [Cruz] told CNN this week…

On the other hand, Cruz’ principled stand can help to grow a movement of disenchanted conservative voters. If a groundswell of conservative grassroots activists grows between now and 2016 — and their financial support – Cruz could have carved out a path to the Republican nomination.

“I think what Senator Cruz understands is that he has more to gain from adhering to his principles, staying in touch with the grass roots here and around the country than he does being friends with other senators,” Brendan Steinhauser, a leading Texas tea party activist who worked to get Cruz elected, said.

***

Ted Cruz isn’t popular among his Republican colleagues in the Senate or the House. He doesn’t care. Ted Cruz isn’t going to be the Senate majority (or minority) leader. He doesn’t care. Ted Cruz isn’t going to be the GOP’s establishment pick for just about any office. He doesn’t care.

What Cruz does care about is that among the Republican base he is known as a populist outsider who cares about them and not the ways of Washington. That he, alone among his colleagues, is willing to put principle first and do everything he can to oppose Obamacare. That, after months of asking for a piece of legislation that would defund Obamacare, Cruz is walking the walk in his opposition to the law…

Cruz’s speech — he’s been going for roughly two and a half hours as of this writing — has repeatedly driven that point home. Time and again he noted that the Senate chamber is empty aside from him, that no one — in either party — is willing to stand on principle against this law. He riffed on those — in both parties — who have criticized his approach to the issue. He condemned Washington for its obsession with the political game and its blindness toward the concerns of real Americans. He has touted himself as the light-shiner on all of this, a force of transparency exposing the underbelly of Washington.

***

“You know, it is fascinating how many politicians in Washington think this isn’t even worth our time. Mr. President, I will point out, as is usually the case, almost always the case, the Senate floor is largely empty. Everyone’s schedules are apparently busy enough that standing up, coming together to stop Obamacare doesn’t make it onto the priority list. We ought to have all 100 Senators on this floor around the clock until we come together and stop Obamacare,” Cruz said…

“You know, sometimes people in the Senate behave as if they have no bosses, as if they’re autonomous rulers … They behave like kings and queens of their own kingdoms. And yet, Mr. President, every one of us has a whole lot of bosses,” Cruz went on, referring to the constituents who elect them…

“What a broken system. We work for the people. And why are the people unhappy with Washington, why are they disgusted with Washington? Because Washington isn’t listening to them,” he went on.

***

The moment marked the climax of a spreading rift between Cruz, the combative champion of grassroots conservatives, and most of the rest of the Republican Party. Around Washington, consultants warned that Cruz’s antics tarnished the GOP brand. Inside the Capitol, colleagues grumbled that his showboating boxed in House Republicans by delaying Senate Democrats’ inevitable victory. “I know how this movie ends,” groused Senator John McCain. “I know all the scenes.”…

Irking the rest of the Senate is not the collateral damage of his strategy; it is the whole plan. ”All those comments only empower him,” Republican strategist Dave Carney told me last summer as I reported a magazine profile of Cruz. “The mark of a scarlet letter today is being part of that club.”

In other words, Cruz sees most Senate peers not as potential friends, but as useful foils. Nor was his plan to outmaneuver Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who deftly slalomed around Cruz’s procedural efforts to delay a vote that will proceed as scheduled on Wednesday. “Most Americans couldn’t give a flying flick about a bunch of politicians in Washington,” Cruz said. But the “surrender caucus,” as he once called them, is Cruz’s biggest asset. As long as he can portray them as spineless, he gets to stand tall.

***

“His fellow senators don’t know where he is coming from,” Rove said. “Sunday morning sitting in the green room waiting for ‘Fox News Sunday’ to begin, I get a call from a senator whom I don’t know too well who said to me ‘Do you know what he is going to say? Because I don’t. I’m a senator and I have no idea what his end game is. I’m going to be watching this in order to figure out what he thinks we should do next.’”

According to Rove, Cruz hasn’t participated in the Thursday morning meetings held by Senate Republicans to lay out his plans for the week, thus not convincing many of his colleagues to support his tactics.

“He should not be surprised — we should not be surprised if their response is ‘We are not going to be dictated to by somebody who doesn’t bother to tell us what he is going to do until after he has made up his mind,’” Rove said.

***

Like a light switch flipping on, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are casting light on the scurrying of Republican roaches in and out of the Capitol. Republican congressmen and Senators are now openly attacking Cruz and Lee. Outside groups like Americans for Tax Reform and outside media interests like the Wall Street Journal are amplifying attacks made by the establishment GOP against conservatives. Lobbyists are up in arms…

But more importantly, and this is the bit the GOP and its media allies simply have not understood — the Cruz strategy would never work in and of itself. It required stronger, braver souls than the GOP currently has to offer. It does, however, throw such a light on these Republicans that it will make it both easier to challenge them in primaries and, more importantly, make it much, much harder for them to cooperate with the Democrats on Obamacare fixes. Win or lose, Cruz and Lee have boxed in both the Democrats and the Republicans into positions that will make it more difficult for them to nuance their way out of.

In short, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have, whether they can muster the support or not in this round, ensured the GOP cannot begin collaborating with the Democrats to fix what the voters want repealed. And you can be sure that they would be working to fix it, despite all their rhetoric otherwise. You can be sure of that because Ted Cruz’s fight has proven just how empty their rhetoric really is.

Republican base voters have, for quite a while, distrusted their leaders. Now, thanks to Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, they know why and they know who, on the inside, they should be listening too.

***

Cruz makes mistakes; everybody does. But he thinks before he acts, and his critics should appreciate that he has a plan.

The plan is obvious enough: to emerge as the next acknowledged political leader of American conservatism in the apostolic succession that begins with Robert Taft, continued through Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, and has had no agreed successor since Newt Gingrich’s retirement from Congress in 1998. Since then, radio and TV talking heads have displaced politicians as the standard bearers of the conservative cause. But a political movement inescapably requires political leadership—and that position has been vacant too long. The electric response among conservatives to Rand Paul’s drone filibuster—despite the many ways in which Rand Paul’s libertarian politics slant against the grain of conservatives in the country—shows the avid hunger among conservatives to see that vacancy filled…

Obviously, Ted Cruz is going to lose his confrontation over Obamacare. In losing, however, he will taint his possible rivals—including Rand Paul—as pitiful members of the “surrender caucus.” Only he will stand brave and true, like Mel Gibson playing Braveheart. The Wall Street Journal calls his campaign “kamikaze.” But the art of political leadership includes a shrewd understanding of how to engineer the right political defeat, for the right audience.

***

In 2012, President Obama said the “most important lesson” of his first term was that “you can’t change Washington from the inside.” What is required is populist pressure from the outside. This was an odd claim on two counts. First, it’s not true. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was an entirely inside affair, an ugly partisan one involving mercenary horse-trading and countless backroom deals with industry and unions. Second, Obama, the community organizer, always believed salvation lay in organizing a movement. It was the premise at the heart of his 2008 campaign in which he told adoring throngs, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”…

If Cruz’s effort fails — and I fear it will — it will be for the same reasons that Obama’s second term has been such a legislative dud. The way you bring change to Washington is through elections. After the elections, change comes from the unsightly sausage-making processes of politics. Both Cruz and Obama have palpable disdain for the consensus-building and glad-handing that these processes require.

Of course, there are huge differences between Obama and Cruz — the most important is that they have completely divergent philosophies. That may matter most, but it isn’t everything. The inside game matters too. Cruz likes pointing out Obama’s failures; he should also learn from them.

***

“Obamacare isn’t working,” he continued. “And yet, fundamentally, there are politicians in this body who are not listening to the people.”

]]>https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/24/quotes-of-the-day-1506/feed/338Mitch McConnell: Ted Cruz’s filibuster would shut down the government and keep ObamaCare funded; Update: Cruz to launch “talking filibuster” at 2:30https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/24/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruzs-filibuster-would-shut-down-the-government-and-keep-obamacare-funded/
https://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/24/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruzs-filibuster-would-shut-down-the-government-and-keep-obamacare-funded/#commentsTue, 24 Sep 2013 18:01:37 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=280100"I just don’t happen to think filibustering a bill that defunds Obamacare is the best route to defunding Obamacare."

Via Roll Call, if the House defunding bill can’t pass the Senate then obviously the money appropriated for ObamaCare will continue to flow. And a filibuster would, of course, prevent it from passing the Senate. Alternate headline: “Who’s the RINO now?”

He’s playing his strongest card here, namely, the fact that the filibuster would spare weak red-state Democrats like Pryor and Landrieu from having to take a tough vote on defunding ObamaCare. If Cruz and Lee convince Republicans to filibuster the House bill, then Pryor can vote for cloture while claiming, just like McConnell, that he’s voting to defund. That protects him back home with conservative voters while ensuring that there are no bad consequences to his vote for Democrats; the bill will have been filibustered, after all, so Pryor’s vote is meaningless. Without the filibuster, though, Pryor will have to vote on Reid’s amendment stripping the “defund” language from the House bill. That vote will split on party lines and Reid can only afford to lose three Democrats from his caucus to get to a simple majority of 51. That means one or more red-state Dems who are up for reelection next year — Pryor, Landrieu, Hagan, Begich, and so on — will have to bite the bullet and vote yes, then go home and explain why to angry conservatives. Who wants to volunteer?

McConnell’s message, in other words, is that a vote on Reid’s amendment is a do-over for Democrats on ObamaCare. If red-state Dems have concerns about the law, now’s their chance to vote with the GOP on defunding it. That talking point does, at least, have the virtue of turning up the heat on the other party instead of turning it up on one’s own. And yet, I’m still surprised that McConnell volunteered to be a pinata for grassroots conservatives by taking the lead on this instead of voting with Cruz in an ultimately futile filibuster bid. As I write this, the Senate Conservatives Fund PAC founded by Jim DeMint is leading with a post about him (and Cornyn) titled, “The Ultimate Betrayal.” He’s going to be the lightning rod for a backlash in the primary now. Why not let McCain or, better yet, someone with conservative cred like Tom Coburn make the case against filibustering?

Oh well. Reid boasted earlier today that there will be no filibuster, which is true. Now that McConnell and Cornyn have nixed it, the question isn’t whether Cruz and Lee can marshal 41 votes, the question is how few they’ll end up with. Rubio, who needs to rebuild his own cred, is with them, but Lindsey Graham apparently went so far as to say that he’ll vote for cloture in the name of avoiding a shutdown even after Reid strips out the defunding language from the House CR(!). Sure are a lot of emboldened RINOs out there right now. Maybe they’re calculating that the PR damage to the party in the wake of a shutdown would actually be more dangerous to them in the general election than a conservative insurgency would be to them in a primary. If so, that’s … a lot of PR damage.

Per Gabe Malor, looks like Boehner will have a single day — Sunday — to decide what to do about defunding before a shutdown occurs, assuming Reid’s schedule in the Senate proceeds as everyone expects. Exit question: Will the House move this week to pass something new before the Senate’s done killing their current bill?

They don’t have 41 to block the House CR but Cruz can seize the opportunity to launch a broadside against ObamaCare on the floor a la Rand Paul’s epic attack on drone policy this spring. Might want to turn on C-SPAN 2 right now if you’re near a TV (or click here). As for how long he’s planning to speak:

Cruz goes into Senate chamber. I ask how long he'll talk. His reply: "We shall see." Ignores other questions.

Update: To clarify: This isn’t a true filibuster in the sense that it’s designed to stop the Senate from voting tomorrow on the House CR. As I understand it, because that vote is already set, it’ll happen regardless of how long Cruz talks.

Update: More from Woodruff:

Sen. GOP source says Cruz's plan is to speak "until he can no longer speak"

Whether or not Senate Republicans defeat cloture, the question will be whether Harry Reid will demand a government shutdown to force Obamacare on every American. We should not shut down the government, and I hope Reid and President Obama do not do so.

Regardless, the House should stand its ground, and if Reid kills this Continuing Resolution then the House should pass smaller CRs one at a time, starting with the military. Dare Reid to keep voting to shut down the government.

Americans are speaking loud and clear. They don’t want to lose their health plans and be forced into Obamacare exchanges, keep their businesses small to avoid the law’s penalties, and let bureaucrats and politicians in Washington make their health care decisions. Let’s listen.

***

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many of his rank and file are poised to cast votes this week that will effectively rebuke Sen. Ted Cruz’s effort to filibuster a stopgap spending bill that would keep the government funded starting Oct. 1…

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is up for re-election and faces a tea party challenge, didn’t mince words about the problem with the tactics being employed by his fellow GOP senators.

“I think we’ll take up the House bill because it’s a good bill. I can’t imagine filibustering the bill that I like from the House. There will be a vote to take out the defunding of Obamacare. It will be a majority vote,” Graham said Monday on Fox News. “And I’m hoping some Democrats will side with all Republicans to keep the defunding in place, but I doubt it.”

***

As leaders, McConnell and Cornyn can’t make GOP senators do anything; individual lawmakers are too independent for that. But the decision does set the example of Republicans willing to risk the wrath of the most dedicated defunders to oppose what they believe is an unworkable plan. And that leaves the Cruz-Lee proposal in a difficult place.

At this point, it is completely unclear how many Republicans will support the Cruz-Lee strategy. The plan depends on support from at least 41 of the Senate’s 46 Republicans. Given the position taken by McConnell and Cornyn, plus the pointed criticism directed at the plan by other Republicans, it seems unlikely Cruz and Lee will meet that goal.

A source in the Lee camp says the defunders expected the leadership not to go along. Now, the source says, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is preparing to shape the legislation like the two-part plan House Majority Leader Eric Cantor tried, and failed, to pass in the House. “Reid has set this up just like the Cantor plan,” says the source. “It gives the GOP a cover vote to say they supported defunding Obamacare but ultimately results in funding it. Once again, they’ve found a way to avoid being accountable. House conservatives rejected this scheme when Cantor proposed it. It should make it easier to reject now that it’s Reid’s proposal.”

***

.@marcorubio: "A vote for cloture will make it easier for Senate Democrats to preserve this job killing (Obamacare) law."

We disagree with Dionne’s assertion that “people don’t get hooked on bad programs,” and we don’t even accept that Social Security and Medicare are good ones. But those programs are, in contrast with ObamaCare, well designed for the objective of sustaining political support. Whereas the benefits they deliver are tangible, their destructive effects are diffuse and deferred. The burden of the payroll tax is psychologically eased by the fiction that it is a retirement investment. And even if younger workers doubt that they’ll get much out of the system, most have parents or grandparents who do.

ObamaCare, by contrast, will impose hardships on a great many Americans in order to give benefits to complete strangers.

Another difference is that whereas past social programs had bipartisan backing in Congress and broad public support, ObamaCare has never had either. Thus only Democrats are politically invested in it. Non-Democrats have little incentive to be patient if it gets off to a bad start, and Democrats have a lot to lose if it fails. That explains their emotional need to believe that it is sure to be a great success. The alternative is the Palin scenario along with, for them, political and ideological humiliation. To our mind that is the likeliest path to repeal of ObamaCare: As Ulysses Grant observed: “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”

Do conservatives like Cruz really believe that ObamaCare will win over the masses if it isn’t stopped now? We don’t know, but we suspect them of an element of cynicism. We aren’t the first to point out that one man who can’t lose in this confrontation is Ted Cruz, who has so raised his profile among Republicans that there is talk of a 2016 presidential campaign.

***

“He’s [Cruz] going to emerge somewhat bloodied, because he’s going to have critics not only from the Democratic Party, but also some from within the Republican Party,” said Craig Shirley, the conservative PR man who’s penned biographies of both Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, the latter of whom was another polarizing conservative involved in a government shutdown. “But I think he’s going to be enhanced as a force within the Republican Party and American politics.”

If the rise of Obamacare was the catalyzing moment for the Tea Party, then a shutdown could give insurgent conservatives an upper hand in their protracted struggle against the GOP establishment for control of the Republican Party.

Conservative groups like the Club for Growth and Heritage Action – while not strictly Tea Party groups, per se – will have demonstrated a commanding degree of influence over the modern Republican Party if they manage to hold enough GOP lawmakers together to prevent party leaders from reaching an agreement to avoid a shutdown.

***

The GOP, of course, didn’t do so well in the Gingrich-Clinton faceoff, and many Republican leaders obviously fear a repeat, where they get blamed for the president’s refusal to compromise. But for Obama, there are risks, too. One is that the government shutdown happens, and nobody cares much — which has pretty much been the story of the sequester, our last budget bugbear. Faced with a tiny percentage cut in government, most voters yawned, or cheered, or moved on oblivious. Obama’s biggest worry should be that if big government shuts down, the same thing will happen.

Another risk is that a shutdown will contribute to an already growing sense of chaos and incompetence at the top. Obama can blame Republicans all he wants, but his party controls the White House and one house of Congress — two-thirds of the elected levers of power in Washington. If he can’t run the country with the White House and the Senate … well, maybe he just can’t run the country. After Syria, he’s lost a lot of credibility abroad; if he can’t keep the government from shutting down at home, he’s likely to lose credibility here as well, no matter how much finger-pointing he does. Ultimately, if the country seems to be in chaos, it’s the president who gets blamed.

The truth is, Obama would be better off cutting a deal with the Republicans. ObamaCare implementation, scheduled for Oct. 1, is going terribly and it seems very unlikely that it will be anything other than what former supporter Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., correctly characterized as a “train wreck.” In fact, they’ve already had to implement delays and exemptions because of problems. And now there’s word that the software doesn’t work… Obama should be trying to work something out, instead of engaging in brinkmanship.

If you’re with Cruz and Lee, the answer is: Bad. And surprising to me.

An aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the Kentucky senator will vote to allow an up-or-down vote in the Senate on the House bill to defund Obamacare.

“Senator McConnell supports the House Republicans’ bill and will not vote to block it, since it defunds Obamacare and funds the government without increasing spending by a penny,” the McConnell aide writes in an email. “He will also vote against any amendment that attempts to add Obamacare funding back into the House Republicans’ bill. If and when the Majority Leader goes down that path, Washington Democrats will have to decide—without hiding behind a procedural vote—whether or not to split with their leadership and join Republicans and their constituents in opposing the re-insertion of Obamacare funding into the House-passed bill.”

Everyone understand what’s going on here? It’d be easier to click the first link up top and read that rather than have me run through it here, but to put it simply, the only way the “defund” caucus can stop Reid from amending the House bill to strip out the provision that defunds ObamaCare is to filibuster the House bill when Reid brings it to the floor to open the debate. That’s counterintuitive because Cruz and Lee support the House bill and normally you only filibuster stuff from the other party that you hate. In this case, though, due to Senate rules, once the bill passes the initial cloture vote and comes to the floor, Democrats can remove the defunding stuff via a simple majority vote of 51 senators. There are 54 Democrats so that’s a relatively easy lift (although not so easy for red-state Dems like Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu who’ll have to swallow this crap sandwich by voting yes a year before they face reelection).

By filibustering the bill before it comes to the floor, though, a mere 41 Republicans can block Reid from amending the bill to take the defunding provisions out, which would paralyze the chamber and probably lead to a shutdown. What the plan is after that, I’m not sure; Reid’s not scared of a shutdown, since Democrats feel sure that Republicans will end up more damaged from it than they will. If anything, Pryor and Landrieu will probably be relieved that they’re spared an up-or-down vote on defunding by a successful filibuster. And even if the government does shut down, ObamaCare will still go into effect because the money’s already been appropriated as part of the original O-Care law. Bottom line, though: To have any chance of stopping a “clean” Democratic CR in the Senate, you need 41 Republicans willing to filibuster. And now, here’s the minority leader saying he won’t be part of that.

A well-connected Senate Republican source says John Cornyn, the second-ranking GOP lawmaker in the Senate, will not go along with a plan advocated by colleagues Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to filibuster a House-passed bill that would fund the federal government but defund Obamacare.

The source says Cornyn will support a bill that defunds Obamacare, but Cornyn will not go along with a plan to filibuster that same bill. “Cornyn will not vote with Cruz on this,” the source says. “It doesn’t make any sense. He [Cruz] has lost the messaging war on this. He has lost the strategy. We’re not going to go along with this.”

Cornyn opposes Obamacare. He supports defunding Obamacare. But he does not support the filibuster plan. Added the source: “Ted Cruz can go out there and explain how he’s going to block a bill that defunds Obamacare, but we’re not going to.”

The surprise, obviously, is that you’ve got two Republicans who are up for reelection next year whom tea partiers already disdain deciding to pull the plug on Ted Cruz’s procedural play on his very first move. Why they would do that when there are probably already six other Senate Republicans willing to cross the aisle and give Reid the 60 votes he needs to beat Cruz’s filibuster, I don’t know. All it does is increase the odds of them being primaried. Per the boldfaced line, though, they’re counting on voters to be deeply confused about exactly what’s going on here; when they’re called out for not voting with Ted, they can say with a straight face that all they did was vote for the House bill that defunds ObamaCare. They could also note, correctly, that by refusing to filibuster they made life more difficult for vulnerable Democrats like Pryor, Landrieu, Begich, and Hagan by forcing them to cast an up-or-down vote on stripping out the defunding provisions. That might be worth something to grassroots righties who are eager to reclaim the Senate.

And of course the extent of the backlash depends on some degree to whether Cruz decides to go after them hard for this publicly. My guess is he won’t. For one thing, he’s always said that it’s the House, not the Senate, that has the real leverage in forcing Democrats to deal on ObamaCare, and he’s right about that. Whether or not defunding succeeds depends upon how firm Boehner and his caucus are, not McConnell and his. Beyond that, Cruz really can’t lose at this point no matter what does or doesn’t happen in the Senate. He’s a tea-party hero for pushing an “if you will it, you can do it” approach to stopping O-Care; if McConnell and Cornyn thwart him, he can just cite that as evidence that less steely Republicans simply don’t have the will — and even better, he won’t have to risk political damage to himself by leading a shutdown-causing filibuster in the Senate. That’s McConnell’s real goal here, I think: He’s going to dump this back in Boehner’s lap by allowing Reid to pass his “clean” CR, and then when House conservatives demand that Boehner shut down the government, Boehner can say that the media will kill them over it by contrasting their approach with the more “reasonable, compromising” Republicans of the Senate like McConnell. Everyone wins (except House conservatives), to the extent that finding a way out of this now can be said to constitute “winning.”

Update: A commenter asked why I’m surprised that two establishmentarians like McConnell and Cornyn would vote this way. Because, quite simply, I expected them to pander to tea partiers by voting with Cruz, secure in the knowledge that other Republicans who don’t have to face reelection next year like Coburn, McCain, Collins, Kirk, etc, would vote with Reid to defeat the filibuster anyway. McConnell could have had his cake and eaten it too. Instead he’s anti-filibuster. Odd.

“There is no downside to coming out against defunding ObamaCare if you’re a Senate candidate,” said longtime GOP strategist Ron Bonjean…

“You’re not part of Washington and you’re talking about people in Washington being part of the problem. Most primary voters will nod their heads and say ‘this makes a lot of sense.’ They’re not thinking about the byzantine political spider webs that occur from trying to make that work.”

***

“It’s clear where the public in my district is,” said Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a tea party firebrand. “They want Obamacare repealed. They want it defunded. They want it dismantled.”…

According to ratings compiled by Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, only 28 of the House’s 233 Republicans have even a theoretical chance of losing their seats to a Democrat next year; the other 205 are safe as long as they win their primaries. (The same is true of most House Democrats, of course.)

Outside the conservative bubble of the House GOP conference, the politics of the budget standoff look different. Karl Rove, former political advisor to George W. Bush, has warned that the only winner in a government shutdown would be Obama. “This is one thing that can rescue him,” Rove said on Fox News.

***

For Republicans who aren’t part of the defunding drive, it was a jaw-dropping proposal. We’re supposed to filibuster our own bill? they ask. We pushed the House to pass a continuing resolution with a defunding measure attached — and now we’re supposed to kill it in the Senate? What sense does that make? And even if it made sense, they say, the plan is simply not possible.

That response has caused deep resentment among defunding proponents. No, they aren’t proposing filibustering their own bill. “What we are filibustering is a procedural maneuver by Reid so that he will not be able to gut the bill that we want a vote on,” says the aide.

“Our demand is for Reid to do one of two things,” the aide continues. “Either agree that all amendments post-cloture have a 60-vote threshold, or bring the amendment up pre-cloture. McConnell can demand those things.” Translated into less insidery language, that basically means forcing Reid to adopt a procedure that would allow Republicans, if they stay united, to stop Reid from taking out the Obamacare provision.

The only problem is that Republicans, in the minority, cannot force Reid to do that. “It would require UNANIMOUS consent to change the vote threshold,” says one aide opposed to the defunding maneuver. “You really think Reid, Schumer, Bernie Sanders are all going to agree to make it EASY to strip Obamacare? Give me a break. And what leverage will they [the defunders] have to ‘force’ that? They will have just filibustered their own bill and shut down the government. They will be solely responsible for shutting down the government. Why would a single Democrat lift a finger to help them — much less give away Obamacare?”

***

The real fear within GOP right now: Suddenly, if you don't folo Cruz-Palin on defund strategy, you risk RINO tag and g'roots wrath

In an appearance on Washington D.C.’s Fox 5 to preview his Sunday show, Wallace said, “I will tell you I have never in my time in Washington seen a party so upset with one of its own members.”…

“Since we announced that Ted Cruz was going to be on the show, I’ve been getting background research and questions going after Cruz not from Democrats but from other Republicans,” Wallace said on Fox 5. “They really feel he has put them in this corner that they can’t get out of gracefully and they’re not very happy with him.”

***

@FoxNewsSunday Keep it TRULY fair & balanced. Release the GOP names encouraging you to trash @SenTedCruz. No more anonymous sources.

Those of us who hang in there supporting a major political party with our energy, time, and contributions would like to believe that that party would praise principled conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee for following through on campaign promises. We’d like to believe that the GOP establishment would applaud the way these bold leaders have rallied the grassroots to their cause. But, no, such praise would require a commensurate level of guts and leadership, and the permanent political class in D.C. is nothing if not gutless and rudderless.

We’re now, once again, subjected to the “anonymous sources” backstabbing game. The Capitol Hill cowards are rushing to anonymously denounce Senator Cruz to any reporter with a pad and pen.

Welcome to our world, Ted. The same people have been denouncing conservatives like me for years (right after they ask for help fundraising for themselves or endorsing the latest candidate they’ve suckered into paying their exorbitant consulting fees). We can compare shiv marks next time we meet, my friend.

Some Senate Republicans, including would-be 2016 presidential rivals Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, have said they would vote to refuse to pay for the health care law, even if it meant shutting down portions of the government. Paul has called closing down the government “a dumb idea.”

***

“You say this is brute political power,” a very-unconvinced Wallace said. “It’s Senate Rule 22, which has been around for years. It’s part of the Senate rules, and it says after you allow debate and take cloture, that you can pass an amendment by Senate majority. That’s the rule!”

“You’re right, that is one rule,” Cruz responded. “But there is another rule that says it takes sixty votes to get cloture…If the majority’s going to run the minority over with a train, the minority has the ability to stop them…Any vote for cloture, any vote to allow Harry Reid to add funding for Obamacare with just a fifty-one vote threshold—a vote for cloture is a vote for ObamaCare.”

“If Harry Reid kills this bill in the Senate, I think the House should hold its ground and should begin passing smaller continuing resolutions one department at a time,” Cruz said. “It should start with a continuing resolution focused on the military. Fund the military, send it over, and let’s see if Harry Reid is willing to shut down the military just because he wants to force ObamaCare on the American people.”

Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, known in the president’s first term as “Dr. No” for his tendency to place holds on bills he views as unconstitutional or otherwise objectionable, is not on board with the push to defund Obamacare. The reason? “We do not have the political power to do this,” he said on Sunday. He chocked the existence of the movement, led in the Senate by Republican senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, to a ”tremendous demand among special interests” to dismantle the president’s signature legislation.

Coburn, a physician, maintained that Republicans will not allow a government sutdown over the issue of Obamacare and, more importantly, simply do not have the votes to do so. ”We are not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we are not going to fund any portion of this, because we can’t do that,” he told CBS’ Bob Schieffer.

House insiders say a handful of House Republicans cursed Cruz in the cloakroom on Wednesday, and a leadership source says angry e-mails were exchanged among GOP staffers who consider Cruz to be a charlatan. “Cruz keeps raising conservatives’ hopes, and then, when we give him what he wants, he doesn’t have a plan to follow through,” an aide fumes. “He’s an amateur.” Another aide says, “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.”

Cruz, however, tells me House Republicans are wrong to be infuriated. In an interview, he says his goal was never to whip together votes in the Senate for a defunding bill; it was always to inspire a grassroots uprising that would rattle Congress and President Obama, and hopefully defund Obamacare.

“I’m convinced there is a new paradigm in politics — the rise of the grassroots,” Cruz says. He cites Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster on drone policy, and the debates on Syria and gun control, as recent examples of how an “overwhelming” number of phone calls and e-mails from constituents can force the president to buckle.

“And on Obamacare, I’ve said, from the start, that if typical Washington rules apply, we can’t win this fight,” he explains.

***

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who has been a thorn in Boehner’s side, said that the group of members who opposed Boehner’s original plan to avoid a shutdown were becoming increasingly effective.

“This is what we said we were going to do and this will be the first time in two years and nine months that we are going to vote on defunding on a must-pass legislation,” he said. “[Leadership] didn’t want to vote on this, and that was pretty clear they didn’t want to fight on it. We want to see them stand on some principles and give us assurance they’ll fight. They couldn’t even get the rule approved.”…

“This is just math. We have 233 House Republican members. The majority in the House is currently 217,” said the aide, noting that it is usually 218 votes but there are two vacancies. “That means a small group of members can gum up the works on any vote. There are fewer and fewer tools available to leadership. Earmarks are gone — which is a good thing, but it has consequences. Taking away committee assignments hasn’t made members any likelier to vote ‘yes’ — and, frankly, no one has a plausible suggestion for what would do the trick. The world simply changed. It’s made the House more open, more transparent, and more difficult to manage.”

***

A shutdown now would have much worse fallout than the one in 1995. Back then, seven of the government’s 13 appropriations bills had been signed into law, including the two that funded the military. So most of the government was untouched by the shutdown. Many of the unfunded agencies kept operating at a reduced level for the shutdown’s three weeks by using funds from past fiscal years.

But this time, no appropriations bills have been signed into law, so no discretionary spending is in place for any part of the federal government. Washington won’t be able to pay military families or any other federal employee. While conscientious FBI and Border Patrol agents, prison guards, air-traffic controllers and other federal employees may keep showing up for work, they won’t get paychecks, just IOUs…

But won’t voters be swayed by the arguments for defunding? The GPS poll tested the key arguments put forward by advocates of defunding and Mr. Obama’s response. Independents went with Mr. Obama’s counterpunch 57% to 35%. Voters in Senate battleground states sided with him 59% to 33%. In lean-Republican congressional districts and in swing congressional districts, Mr. Obama won by 56% to 39% and 58% to 33%, respectively. On the other hand, independents support by 51% to 42% delaying ObamaCare’s mandate that individuals buy coverage or pay a fine.

***

“It’s a great day for America,” Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA), the author and principal sponsor of the legislative vehicle by which Republicans aim to take down Obamacare, added. “It truly is. We’re on the eve of a historic moment here in Washington, D.C., as we take this vote in the House tomorrow. We’re sending a very strong message to the American people that we as Republicans in the House and the Senate are united in a way that I haven’t seen in a long, long time. We’re united in the common goal of protecting the American people from the harmful effects of Obamacare. In turn, the question turns to the Senate and directly to Harry Reid. What will Harry Reid do? Will he continue to protect his friends, the president’s friends, big business and members of Congress, those on K Street, or will he also extend protections to the American people? That’s really what it comes down to: A simple question for Harry Reid and what will Harry do, is the question America will be asking over the next couple of days.”…

“The Democrats want full implementation of Obamacare, and we want full repeal of Obamacare,” Labrador said. “And we’re seeing all we’re asking for is a one-year delay. That is a minimum ground that we’re asking Harry Reid to take. He’s calling us all sorts of names like ‘anarchist,’ or ‘terrorist’ and all these names. And we’re the ones who are actually taking a reasonable position with regards to this law and it’s Harry Reid and the president who are willing to shut down the government if they don’t get everything they want with a law they believe is going to be harmful to the American people.”

***

In 2012, Obama won another term and Reid maintained an iron grip on the Senate. That is a reality that cannot be ignored as strategies are developed to prevent Obamacare from taking firm or permanent root…

Republicans should build on the support that House Democrats recently showed in calling for the delay of Obamacare. We should try to remove the most damaging parts and make sure that all Americans — including members of Congress and their staffs — are treated equally under the law. We should then make certain that Obamacare is the preeminent issue in the 2014 congressional elections.

***

In a radio interview with Andrea Tantaros earlier [Wednesday], for example, Cruz aimed most of his barbs at the GOP, despite House Republicans’ decision only hours earlier to embrace his plan on the CR.

“Right now, I can tell you, the people who are fighting the hardest against our efforts to defund Obamacare are not Democrats, it’s Republicans. It’s Republicans who have been leading the onslaught, trying to stop this. Because they’re afraid of the political risk. They’re afraid of being blamed politically,” he said…

But he also sketched out what can be a politically potent argument to put to Democrats: “We gotta say, ‘no, we don’t want to shut the government down. We have voted to continue the government running. President Obama has granted waivers from Obamacare to big corporations and to members of Congress. Why is President Obama threatening to shut the government down to deny those some waivers to hard-working American familiies?’ Their position is indefensible.”

***

“It’s amazing to me you have leaders, none of whom — all of them know [shutdown is] a bad idea, bad for Republicans, they don’t want to risk it,” Todd asserted.

“Nobody seems to want it and yet I don’t know how they avoid it, at least for a couple of days,” he continued. “That’s what I keep envisioning, some sort of 48 hour shutdown or 24 where there’s some small version of this.”

“I’ve had House Republican aides say this to me before in previous fights, sometimes they have to educate some of these members, how it will play out, how they would believe it, they don’t have to see it for themselves,” Todd revealed.

“I support limited government,” [Scott Walker] added. “But I want the government left to work.”

There is a straightforward solution to address the current predicament, Walker suggested: put the question before the voters next year.

“The way to resolve this is through candidates making the case in the 2014 election,” he said. “They can make a case they’re going to come on in and put the power back in the hands of the people, not in the government.”

***

What a shame all this melodrama is a mirage, a farce, a game…

For some the answer has to do with pent up fury in need of an outlet, and the effort to defund the ACA is that outlet. It also appeals to those who find it satisfying to turn every debate into an apocalyptic clash. And even if Republicans fail, at least they “fought the good fight.” (Ronald Reagan referred to people of this mindset as those who enjoyed “going off the cliff with all flags flying.”)

But there’s also a tendency among some on the right—not all, certainly, but some—to go in search of heretics. They seek to purify the conservative movement—to eliminate from it the defilement, the debasement, and the corruption they see all around them—and they bring to this task an almost religious zeal. They are the Keepers of the Tablets. And they are in a near constant state of agitation. Living in an imperfect world while demanding perfection (or your version of perfection) from others can be hard.

This is not conservatism either in terms of disposition or governing philosophy. It is, rather, the product of intemperate minds and fairly radical (and thoroughly unconservative) tendencies. Such things have always been with us; and some of the uncontained passions and anger will eventually burn out. The question is how much damage will be done in the process.

***

Katrina Pierson is a good example. The Dallas-based tea-party activist, who volunteered for Cruz’s Senate campaign, announced last week that she’s challenging Representative Pete Sessions in his primary, and tells me that Cruz inspired her move.

“He’s still holding his campaign promises,” she continues, “and the simple fact that he did it lets the rest of us know that not only can we do it, but we need to give him some backup, bottom line.”

Pierson says Cruz’s campaign functioned as a sort of boot camp for grassroots activists, who built a support network that’s only grown since the campaign ended. And Cruz’s involvement in the effort to defund the Affordable Care Act has spurred more Texans to volunteer, according to Pierson.

***

Meanwhile, as Obama lays the groundwork for the coming campaign, Republicans are fighting among themselves over an impossible quest to defund Obamacare. After that is resolved, they will fight among themselves over the circumstances of increasing the nation’s debt limit. And then they’ll fight among themselves over something else.

Every day the GOP is consumed with its internal squabbles is a day Republicans don’t concentrate on the issues most important to voters. So now, amidst the feuding, some in the GOP are asking: What case will we make for ourselves in 2014? In the strategist’s words, “What has a Republican Congress accomplished?”…

The point is not to dump on Obama. The point is to show what Republicans have done with power. “He’s not going to be up for re-election again,” says the strategist. “We better start proving to people that if we’re given responsibility, we can do something with it. This isn’t about him any more. It’s about who we are.”

***

Where this goes from here is not clear. The Senate will not accept the House bill, so it will send a “clean” funding bill back to the House stripped of the Obamacare poison. In the most optimistic GOP view, the “hello no” caucus will learn that this was a bootless effort and they will sign on to whatever Boehner cooks up to keep the government doors open. Is this group of conservatives really going to change their mind? What will cause them to do so? The constituents back home who have been cheering their fight to defund Obamacare? The increased condescension that the New York Times editorialists use when describing them? A stock market plunge?

If the loss doesn’t get Boehner the votes he needs, he will then have no other choice but to turn to Democrats for votes to avoid a shutdown. That won’t be pretty, because Democrats will exact a price against the backdrop of the ticking clock. (If you are counting at home, there are only 12 days until the government technically runs out of money).

Just thinking out loud about what’s next now that Boehner and Cantor have punted to McConnell and Cruz in the Senate. Procedure wonks are invited to correct me, but unless I’m mistaken, there are two next steps once the House gets done passing a continuing resolution that defunds O-Care. First, Reid may bring the House bill to a vote in the Senate. He doesn’t have to, I think, but he might want to do so in order to advertise that it doesn’t have majority support there. Question one: How will Senate Republicans who oppose shutting down the government vote on that? Last time I checked, that’s most of the caucus — even fiscal conservatives like Tom Coburn, who reject the “defund” movement because they think it’ll surely result in a standoff with the Democrats and a destructive shutdown on which the GOP will ultimately cave. But that doesn’t mean Coburn et al. have to vote against the House bill. They could vote for it, if only as a symbolic rejection of ObamaCare, knowing that the bill will be killed by Democrats along party lines. If that’s what happens, then the bill loses 45/55.

The next step after that is unclear right now. Boehner and Cantor could try to pass a new CR in the House that funds ObamaCare while reassuring conservatives that they’ll try again on defunding during the debt-ceiling fight. Or Reid could try to pass a new CR along those same lines in the Senate. (A Twitter pal notes that bills related to revenue are supposed to originate in the House, but I believe the usual workaround for that is simply stripping the content from a House bill that’s already reached the Senate and substituting the text of a Senate CR.) Question two: How do Senate Republicans vote on that one? Maybe Coburn, McCain, and a few other “defund” skeptics decide to bite the bullet and vote with Reid, having already cast a symbolic vote against ObamaCare by supporting the first House CR. But that won’t solve their political problem with conservatives. Righties will attack them, not without reason, for destroying the House’s leverage ahead of a shutdown by siding with Reid, who’ll crow that even Senate Republicans think the House is nuts. It’s impossible to imagine the “defunders” winning a PR war when the White House is armed with a talking point like that. Which means maybe Coburn et al. will have no choice but to vote no on Reid’s CR too, even though they’d surely support the same bill if it was already approved by the House. That means Reid CR will be filibustered, 55/45, leaving the Senate deadlocked and nothing on Obama’s desk.

At that point, with odds of a shutdown rising, the pressure from Boehner and Cantor on Republicans to pass a clean CR through the House and focus on the debt ceiling would be intense. (“What the conservatives don’t understand is that a shutdown is terrible for Republicans, but default is terrible for everyone.”) That’s what the Senate Republican “defund” skeptics are waiting for: Once the House caves on funding O-Care, they’ll be the lightning rod for conservative upset, not the Senate. Then the Senate GOP can vote en masse for the House’s CR, with only the “defund” true believers like Cruz, Paul, and Lee voting no on principle. That’s how I think this is going to play out, but like I say, I’m willing to be corrected.

Here’s McCain on CNN this morning sounding very mavericky indeed about the prospects of a shutdown. You won’t be surprised to learn that Jeff Flake, who’s stood shoulder to shoulder with McCain on all sorts of policies since joining the Senate this year, agrees with him. Skip to 5:40 for the key bit. Will Maverick vote to block the “defund” crowd before he absolutely has to?

“On the CR, we know what the position of this conference is,” Boehner said, speaking before his colleagues. “Every member in this room is for defunding Obamacare while letting the rest of the government continue to operate. We’re going to put Obamacare defunding directly into the CR. And then we’re going to send it over to the Senate, so our conservative allies over there can continue the fight. That’s where the fight is.”

“On every major issue we’ve faced for the past two and a half years, the math has been the same: House Republicans either find a way together to get to 218, or the Democrats who run the rest of Washington essentially get everything they want,” he added, pressing for House GOP unity.

Cantor wanted to send two separate bills to the Senate, one a straightforward CR that would fund O-Care and the other a defunding measure. Obviously Reid would have passed the former and trashed the latter, leaving “defund” supporters with a symbolic House vote (like the 40+ that have preceded it) and nothing else. Fine, says Boehner, you win — we’ll send only one bill that defunds ObamaCare to the Senate. Mitch McConnell, who’s terrified of losing conservative support in the Kentucky primary, will have no choice but to push for it, but even a weakened Obama isn’t going to lose many Senate Democrats when he’s defending the party’s signature legislation.

Which is to say, Reid and the Democrats will kill the new defunding bill, and then … what? Robert Costa expects that, once the “defund” measure fails, Boehner and Cantor will ask House conservatives to pass a clean CR that funds O-Care and wait for the debt-ceiling fight to try again to defund (or delay) the law. Will the caucus go along, though? WaPo wonders:

One, these conservatives have already demonstrated a willingness to buck leadership. Two, many of them view this as the last best chance to derail Obamacare, given imminent implementation dates. Three, their biggest political concerns are primary challenges and the ire of conservative groups who also want to shred Obamacare at all costs. A “we-tried-once-so-now-let’s-back-away” posture won’t ease any of their political pressures.

What’s more, in order for a budget strategy to really be tested, it must be drawn out to the last moment. These negotiations have increasingly become blinking contests, and Defund Obamacare advocates aren’t going to be happy until Senate Democrats are faced with a choice between a government shutdown and defunding Obamacare. Anything else will be seen as a token effort.

Would Boehner and the GOP leadership tolerate even a brief shutdown, if only to prove to the base that they weren’t afraid to do it to try to get Senate Dems to compromise, or is this going to be another situation where the Hastert Rule goes out the window at the last minute and Boehner passes something with Democratic votes plus a few dozen Republican moderates? Paul Ryan’s reportedly already being lined up to convince his colleagues that a shutdown is a bad idea. “The fight is on the debt limit,” he told the caucus this morning, per Costa. And indeed, according to WaPo reporter Paul Kane, Cantor apparently expects that ObamaCare will still be a live issue by the time the battle over the debt ceiling begins:

Giving up on entitlement reform, eh? Wonderful. Anywhere, there you go — a sneak preview of the next few weeks. The House will pass an essentially symbolic defund measure. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul will do their best to argue for passing it in the Senate and will fail, hopefully at least with Senate Republicans lined up behind them in opposition to Reid’s funding measure but maybe not. (McCain warned Republicans not to shut down the government this morning on CNN, but whether that means he’d vote for a CR that funded O-Care in the name of breaking a tea-party filibuster or would vote against it while waiting for the House to pass a clean CR themselves is unclear.) Then Boehner, Ryan, et al. will call for House Republicans to pass a CR that funds O-Care for the time being and to shift the defunding argument to the debt ceiling, where they’ll … surely stand on principle. Surely they won’t cave again for fear of the bad press the GOP would get for pursuing ObamaCare brinksmanship with America’s creditworthiness on the line. Right?

At least 43 conservatives want the GOP leadership to go for broke, asserting that Obama has been damaged by stumbles over Syria and by several delays in implementing the Affordable Care Act…

“I think the president’s too weak to shut the government down … I think we will win,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said…

“To assume that they won’t yield is making the assumption that Democrats will not listen to their constituents back home. And I disagree with that. Because the American people realize that [ObamaCare’s] not ready for prime time,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said.

***

“What I haven’t been willing to negotiate, and I will not negotiate, is on the debt ceiling,” Obama told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview on “This Week.”

“If we continue to set a precedent in which a president … is in a situation in which each time the United States is called upon to pay its bills, the other party can simply sit there and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to put — pay the bills unless you give us … what we want,’ that changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely,” Obama said…

“All I can do when it comes to that group of members of Congress is to continue to talk to ‘em and say, ‘Let’s put aside our differences. Let’s stay focused on the American people,’” Obama said. “If we do that, we can get things done.”

The plan, derided as a “trick” by some conservatives, would have let them cast an essentially symbolic vote to defund the healthcare law without risking a shutdown, which is feared by party leaders who remember the political damage they suffered when government offices closed their doors in the mid-1990s.

Under the plan, Republican leaders were prepared to extend funding through mid-December at an annualized $988 billion, the same amount as 2013 after reductions went into effect under the across-the-board cuts called sequestration. The White House signaled last week it could live with a short-term extension at that level, even though the president wants to reverse the sequester cuts.

But some Democrats have said they want higher spending and would oppose a stopgap funding bill at the post-sequester amount.

***

What makes this time is different is that, in addition to having carved out hardline positions, neither side has an incentive to back down…

Start with the White House, which has been annoyingly open to concessions even when it has all the leverage. In my own conversations with White House officials (and people close to them) over the past few months, I’ve picked up a clear willingness to allow a shutdown if Republicans refuse to budge. This is unlike 2011, the last time the White House faced a shutdown situation. Back then, a well-connected former administration official told me recently, “the political strategists wanted a deal. [Senior adviser David] Plouffe wanted a deal . . . to increase our numbers with independents.” This time, according to this source, “There’s no constituency for caving.”

That jibes with the change of heart I’ve detected when speaking directly to White House officials. In 2011, they were queasy about the risks a shutdown posed to the rickety economy, which could ultimately hurt the president. This year, they believe a shutdown would strengthen their hand politically, which is almost certainly true given the public outrage that would rain down on Republicans. One official pointed out that the pressure for spending cuts has subsided with the deficit falling so rapidly on its own.

Of course, the president himself isn’t the toughest negotiator in the world. You can’t rule out the possibility that the White House will blink when the deadline gets close. At the very least, one can imagine Obama signing a short-term government funding measure (known as a continuing resolution) that leaves the automatic sequester cuts in place so long as it doesn’t touch Obamacare. But even if he were inclined to do this, Congressional Democrats seem less willing to support him than in the past. They believe they can demand much more in exchange for saving the GOP from a shutdown. “Our leadership thinks the time has come to draw a line in the sand, not do a short-term extension,” a senior Democratic Hill aide told Politico last week. “They’re ready for a flash and a pop.” Bottom line: Democrats across the board are more willing to broach a shutdown than at any other time during the past three years.

***

Republican leaders have balked. They have and are, even now, running hit jobs in Washington newspapers attacking the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action for America, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and even the Club for Growth. The DC Republicans have refused to defund Obamacare — going so far as to schedule more symbolic votes to register their opposition to the law while refusing to connect its defunding to must pass measures like the continuing resolution.

Inside the Beltway, the DC GOP Establishment has recruited lobbyists and others to make the case for delaying Obamacare, instead of defunding it. They couch it as the same, but there’s a catch — the bureaucracy will still be able to lock Obamacare in and hurt businesses and people. Republican Leaders, with their “delay” effort will let the bureaucrats continue writing regulations for it, they’ll get rid of the Congressional exemption to Obamacare, but they are flat out refusing to fight the good fight to defund it…

For those who would argue this is just a rejection of the President and the GOP has done nothing — in 2012 the GOP nominated a nothing who did nothing on Obamacare and the public decided it’d rather go with the nothing it knew than the nothing it cared nothing for. Romney refused to focus his campaign like a laser on Obamacare because of Romneycare. But now, people are losing their jobs, their full time status, and their healthcare because of Obamacare. And they’re listening to Jim DeMint and his friends call for defunding it. And they’re hearing their Republican congressmen lie to them saying they too support defunding Obamacare.

Yes, it is true, the GOP would probably get the blame for a government shut down if that happened. But if they held the line until defunding happened, they would be rewarded. The public likes winners. And right now “Defund It!” is the winning message. It has boosted the GOP’s popularity and Congress’s approval rating. It will be devastating for the GOP if they show voters just how much they are not willing to fight. It’ll be “read my lips” all over again.

***

The principled theory, which I believe is the more accurate one, goes something like this: Desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s worth taking the political hit of a government shutdown now, because if we don’t, Obamacare will be permanent, and the war against big government will be lost forever.

And this is where the pro-shutdown forces go terribly wrong. The idea that we had a free-market health-care system before Obamacare, and a socialized one after, is completely and utterly incorrect. In 2010, before the passage of Obamacare, U.S.-government entities spent more per capita on health care than all but three other countries in the world. Obamacare adds to that spending by around 10 to 15 percent. Not good, to be sure, but not the whole kit and caboodle either.

Even if Obamacare can’t be reversed, it does not spell the doom of conservatism, any more than the passage of the Great Society in 1965 spelled the doom of conservatism, any more than the passage of the New Deal in the 1930s spelled the doom of conservatism, any more than the creation of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve in 1913 spelled the doom of conservatism.

“I understand I will never convince some republicans about the merits of Obamacare,” he continued. “I understand that, and I am more than willing to work with them where they have specific suggestions that they can show will make the health care system better. Remember, initially this was like repeal and replace the replace thing has gone off to the wayside.”

“There’s a move by my Republican colleagues to use the continuing resolution to defund Obamacare,” Flake said at a local Chamber of Commerce breakfast this week. “I would love to defund Obamacare, but the continuing resolution is not the mechanism.”

He continued to assert that the health-care law will “be a continual drag of the economy” and that recent delays show it is “falling on its own weight.”

***

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he plans to avert a government shutdown at the end of September by passing a “short-term” budget bill that maintains sharp automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester…

While Boehner did not explicitly rule out using the CR for an Obamacare fight, other sources on the call said it was clear he preferred not to use the spending bill to draw a line in the sand. “He didn’t rule it out, but indicated to members that defund through CR is not the best strategy,” a second source said…

On Obamacare strategy:

“We will also continue to implement the plan to stop Obamacare that I outlined last month. The delays the administration has been forced to implement in the health-care law have given us a golden opportunity to talk about fairness: “If big business gets relief from the president’s health-care law, families and small businesses should, too.” This message strikes a chord with Americans. When people hear it, it resonates. The president has already signed seven bills delaying or repealing parts of his health-care law. We’re going to keep the pressure on the president and Senate to act on the delay bills that passed the House in July with significant bipartisan support. You may have seen Shelly Moore Capito do this in Saturday’s GOP weekly address. We’re going to keep holding votes that chip away at the legislative coalition the president is using to force Obamacare on the nation.”

***

Republicans are looking ahead to their other major opportunity this fall, when the Treasury hits the debt ceiling in October or November. Reuters reported Tuesday night that House leadership was considering using that point “as leverage to try to delay the law’s implementation”; the Huffington Post spoke to an aide from majority leader Eric Cantor’s office who hinted at a similar strategy, saying, it’s “not repeal” but “potentially the individual mandate delay and codifying the business mandate delay — and perhaps other aspects” that they’re looking at…

Why exactly House leadership is insisting on moving this fight to the debt ceiling rather than the continuing resolution isn’t clear, and does present a problem if they’re serious about trying to get an Obamacare delay: Klein is exactly right that the debt ceiling is a much bigger bomb to set than the CR (though next time Republicans really do threaten to shut down the government, you can bet liberals will compare it to a lot worse than a case of the flu). Thus, House leadership is almost definitely not actually willing to let it go off, because they understand the economic consequences could well be as bad as Klein says they would be; their strategy resides on convincing Democrats that they can’t control their own caucus.

Thus, it’s not even clear the debt-ceiling threshold is actually a politically credible threat anymore for Republicans, and they capitulated on it, albeit for a shorter period of time, last time it came up – so why pick the Obamacare fight over it rather than government funding?

***

Meadows says he would back an attempt to delay the implementation of Obamacare by linking it to a debt ceiling hike. “I’ve gone out of my way to say this is one strategy and about 80 of us believe in it, but I’m open to others. Leadership has a concern, as do I—they don’t want side effects that would hurt people, and a government shutdown could do that,” he says. “It’s overwhelming in my town halls—they’re saying we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to stop this, whether it’s [my] strategy or another one.”…

In some respects, including Obamacare in the negotiations this fall is a fight Republicans win just by having it. Much of the reporting out of Washington in coming weeks will focus on the struggle over the budget and the debt ceiling. By adding Obamacare to that debate, Republicans will force the White House—and vulnerable Democrats in Congress—to defend the law at precisely the time they’d like to avoid it. Even if Republicans “lose” in this scenario—if Obama refuses to consider delaying any more of Obamacare—at a minimum they will have bought leverage for other parts of the negotiation and provided voters with a clear reminder of who owns the coming chaos.

***

A swelling coalition of conservative activists—card-carrying members of the “repeal ObamaCare” campaign—are lighting up the movement with a different approach. The plan aims to leverage public support, play on Democrat weaknesses, and, most notably, sidestep a shutdown fight that would damage the GOP even as it failed to kill the law. Meet the “Delay coalition.”…

The Delay strategy is at least aimed at an achievable goal. Its outlines are contained in a letter engineered by Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice. The letter was crafted with the aid of influential repeal activists—Phil Kerpen at American Commitment, Grover Norquist and Ryan Ellis at Americans for Tax Reform, the Galen Institute’s Grace-Marie Turner, Jim Capretta, Ken Hoagland, Avik Roy, the list rolls on—and now has more than 40 signatures. The letter calls on congressional Republican leaders to use one of this fall’s legislative fights to impose a one-year delay of ObamaCare’s individual mandate, exchange subsidies and taxes.

The political calculus is that delay, unlike defund, pushes Democrats to do something that many are already inclined to do. The president himself has endorsed delay for key parts of the bill—the employer mandate, out-of-pocket-caps, income verification requirements. Unions, the bedrock of the liberal base, are demanding wholesale changes in the law. Vulnerable Senate Democrats know the ObamaCare exchanges are a pending disaster, and they are terrified of political fallout. Twenty-two House Democrats in July voted with Republicans to delay the individual mandate.

An ObamaCare delay, the coalition argues, is also in line with public opinion. Whereas shutdown would prove a complex and messy PR job, the public is already highly educated on the big ObamaCare issues. A majority opposes provisions like the individual mandate, and is worried by the exchanges. The president’s own delays have handed Republicans powerful messaging tools. They can enlist the public to pressure Democrats to grant individuals the same mandate reprieve Mr. Obama has gifted to business, and to delay exchanges that lack the verification and security procedures necessary to protect taxpayers and confidential information.

***

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean on Thursday described Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and others who support threatening a government shutdown in order to defund Obamacare as “irresponsible” and “petty, radical-right people.”

“We can do better this, and I think the American voters are going to throw these people out,” he said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” “If they keep doing this, the impossible may become possible. We could take back the House in 2014.”

In Texas this week, Cruz is holding town halls rallying supporters around the idea of urging Congress to strip money for the president’s signature health care plan before voting on the next funding measure in September.

But Dean argued “people do not want to put up with this kind of stuff” and “it’s about time Ted Cruz started thinking about America and not himself.”

Given the choice between a more moderate course and a more conservative one, 54 percent choose a more conservative one, while 41 percent choose moderation.

And asked about whether their party has compromised too much, too little or just the right amount, Republicans split into three pretty equal camps. Just 29 percent say it hasn’t compromised enough…

As we’ve written before, if you’re a GOP leader or a potential presidential candidate, we’re not sure what you take away from these numbers — apart from that it’s probably best to err on the side of being more conservative.

***

“[N]ow what we’ve got is Republicans talking about the idea that they would shut down the government — bad for the economy, bad for not just people who work for the government, but all the contractors who — and the defense folks and everybody who is impacted by the services that they receive from the federal government, we should shut that down, because Republicans, after having taken 40 votes to try to get rid of Obamacare, see this as their last gasp.

Nobody thinks that’s good for the middle class. So the question is ultimately, if you are putting the American people first, if you are prioritizing them, then this shouldn’t be that difficult. And I’ve made this argument to my Republican friends privately, and, by the way, sometimes they say to me privately, ‘I agree with you, but I’m worried about a primary from, you know, somebody in the Tea Party back in my district,’ or, ‘I’m worried about what Rush Limbaugh is going to say about me on the radio. And so you got to understand, I’m — it’s really difficult.'”

I think he’s right, but that just means we’re never going to do it, no? We had two huge chances last year to kill it in its crib. One was at the Supreme Court. Anthony Kennedy was prepared to pull the trigger; John Roberts wasn’t. The other was in November. We blew it both times.

The last gasp before the exchanges are up and running is to follow Cruz and hold out for defunding, but that feels like an underpants-gnome process at this point. Step one: Pass an amendment withholding funding for O-Care in the continuing resolution. Step two: ???? Step three: Obama caves and agrees to defund. What’s step two here?

“If there is ever a time to defeat Obamacare, it is now,” Cruz said at a briefing at the Heritage Foundation. “Moreover, we have, I believe, the best opportunity we will have, and possibly the last good opportunity we will have to defund Obamacare with the continuing resolution.”

“If we do not pursue this strategy,” he said later, “we are saying we surrender. Obamacare will be a permanent feature of the American economy.”…

“If the subsidies kick in, the prospect or full repeal of Obamacare diminish dramatically,” Cruz said.

Absolutely true. Obama’s secret weapon here is dependency and the sooner dependency begins, the more difficult it is to cancel the program. This is why Team O is dead set, come hell or high water, on getting the exchanges up and running. They’ll delay the employer mandate, they’ll suspend the anti-fraud provisions — they’ll fiddle with the law however they need to in order to make it more salable in the near term so long as the exchanges start on time. Hence Cruz’s desperation in dramatic action soon. But sketch this out for me: Even if Karl Rove’s polls showing that the public overwhelmingly opposes shutting down the government are wrong, under what scenario does Obama cave and decide to agree to defunding (or some lesser compromise anti-ObamaCare measure)? This is his baby. If immigration reform falls apart, O-Care may be the only real domestic legacy he has as president. He knows he has his boot on the GOP’s throat when it comes to repeal thanks to his two big wins last year. Even if the public blamed him for a shutdown rather than the GOP, how likely is it that he’ll break and risk destroying his legacy by signing a bill that defunds the program before the exchanges go into effect? I’d say it’s absolute zero, especially knowing that the media will go face first into the tank for him in blaming any shutdown on the GOP. Even staunch ObamaCare critics like Peter Suderman can’t see the endgame here.

In fact, according to the CRS, a government shutdown wouldn’t even stop certain key parts of O-Care from taking effect. Subsidies under the law are mandatory spending, so they continue; the penalties for not buying insurance would continue too. Instead of demanding defunding, then, why not demand that the individual mandate be suspended instead? That’s better terrain for the GOP since they can push the point (as Ted Cruz already is doing) that it’s unfair to exempt business owners for a year and not individual citizens. O will dig in because he needs the revenue from the mandate, but the mandate is sufficiently unpopular that you might get some Democrats voting against it too. Who knows what happens after that? Click the image to watch.

The movement to enter the inevitable budget battle this fall armed with ObamaCare’s funding as a political weapon is apparently gaining some traction on Capitol Hill; as Guy mentioned yesterday, the number of Republican Congresspeople adding their names to the Rubio/Cruz/Lee-led push to defund the health care law is growing, and Sen. Mike Lee just dropped this little note in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s inbox:

Dear Leader Reid:

We view the Obama Administration’s recent decision to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate and eligibility verification for the individual exchanges as further proof the law is a failure that will inevitably hurt businesses, American families, and the economy.

In light of this admission, we believe the only way to avert disaster is to fully repeal ObamaCare and start over with a more sensible, practical approach to reforming our healthcare system.

However, if Democrats will not agree with Republicans that ObamaCare must be repealed, perhaps they can at least agree with the president that the law cannot be implemented as written. If the administration will not enforce the law as written, then the American people should not be forced to fund it.

This is a matter not only of fiscal prudence, but of fundamental fairness as well. The president cannot seriously expect to waive ObamaCare’s onerous mandates on large businesses, while simultaneously forcing individuals and families to pay to implement an individual mandate the public has opposed since before the law was even passed.

For these reasons, we will not support any continuing resolution or appropriations legislation that funds further implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare.

“I think some of these guys need to understand that you shut down the federal government, you better have a specific reason to do it that’s achievable,” Burr continued. “Defunding the Affordable Care Act is not achievable through shutting down the federal government. At some point you’re gonna open the federal government back up and he won’t have signed this illusion of the Affordable Care Act.”

And indeed, others are pointing out that fully repealing the law is going to be the only effective way of actually getting rid of it; Sen. Lee’s fellow Utahan Sen. Orrin Hatch is all about the repeal efforts, but thinks that Lee’s “not going to win on that, and that will open the Republicans up to all kinds of false criticism.” Karl Rove agrees that it’ll give Democrats another chance to tee off on Republican obstructionism:

The defund-Obamacare Republicans in the Senate hope to strip out that discretionary funding from a continuing resolution needed to fund the government that Congress will debate in September.

They know they won’t succeed. Democrats, with 54 votes, have enough to pass anything that requires a simple majority, and won’t have much trouble getting to a filibuster-proof 60 votes, either. “I could count six or seven Republicans who would vote for full funding of the continuing resolution without breaking a sweat,” says one Senate aide who supports defunding. “So they’re going to get to 60.”

But that’s just the discretionary part of Obamacare. The far bigger portions of the program, including the billions and billions of dollars in subsidies that will start going to Americans on Jan. 1, are mandatory spending, an entitlement funded by an automatic appropriation which is written into law and runs without further congressional action. To change that, Congress would have to change Obamacare.